


The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Conquerors, Spattered With The Viscera Of Its Weak And Decadent People

by TrollUrsulaKLeGuin (Snarp)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Angst, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Coercion, Doomed Timelines, Hatemarrying Yourself, Hurt/Comfort, I have dishonored my ancestors beyond comprehension with this frivolous fanfic., Irresponsible Angsty Stuff, Isolation, Kankri Just Dying Over And Over, M/M, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Self-Indulgent, Sexual Frustration, Starvation, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-28
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-06 19:37:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snarp/pseuds/TrollUrsulaKLeGuin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat angrily kicked open a locked Prospitian mop-closet door, having worked himself up to a perfectly rational moment of existential anxiety regarding <i>The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Conquerors, Spattered With The Viscera Of Its Weak And Decadent People,</i> by Troll Ursula K. Le Guin, and the potential existence of a starving little chess kid locked in there being scared of mops, and oh fuck, that would be so fucking sad.</p><p>The door opened to an ocean of his fucking blood on a black shore with mutant red bloodpushers embedded in it.</p><p>  <em>Okay, yeah, there was pretty much no way LOPAH wasn't going to be behind that door.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _Author: Drain pus from brain to prevent it from getting into other in-progress work._
> 
>  
> 
> If you haven't read _The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,_ it's [here](http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt). You can imagine why Karkat would get all bent out of shape about it.

After the first few dream bubbles, Karkat made the reasonable decision to stay the fuck away from these assholes and look for, like, a library or something.  
  
"What, dude, seriously? We got these weird afterlify places to explore and you're just going to just sit around and read."  
  
Dave was engaged in the intellectually stimulating act of throwing sugar cubes from the balcony of an unnecessarily spiky Dersite structure, which looked like a castle but was probably in fact crammed entirely full of canned spinach, if the Mayor was any indication.  
  
Down below was a herd of confused horsaroni, standing on the brim of what appeared to be a massive urine-soaked head-covering device. Karkat had no idea what was going on with that.  
  
"Yes, that is an accurate description of my goals, thank you, Strider. So in order to keep this complex imaginary civilization of dead assholes running smoothly, I have written you in as my replacement for listening to my ancestor talk. I did this on Lalonde's official leader blackboard in official purple chalk, so it's extremely official."  
  
"Does she have an official leader blackboard."  
  
"I gave it to her as a despair-warming present. She mostly just draws tentacles on there, I guess they're mission-critical. Look, not important. Most of my books were in my hive, which your omnipoJack so helpfully turned green and exploded, and I've reread all of the remainder at least three times already. I am going to look for a memory of a library."  
  
"Dude, now that you said that you are so never going to find a single book. Why do you think we never get to hang with John and Jade? You do not state your intentions to the dream bubbles, they will absolutely fuck you over."  
  
"Of fucking course I won't find any, you can't even _have_ intentions going into these things. Unless you're Vriska or Meenah, for some reason."  
  
"Yeah, the psychopaths have special dreamy-weamy privileges. I think your juggalo's even grosser ancestor can navigate out here pretty well, too, he like brings his yellow bro and the hotter catgirl weird stuff all the time. But you ask him how he does it and he just goes like: "...""  
  
"Because he's a fucking mime, Strider. Also, since when is that insipid clown worshipper better-looking than Nepeta? They look exactly the fucking same, but Nepeta's brain cells have a few working connections between them."  
  
He scratched his head. "Had. Probably. I wonder what would happen if we gave a ghost an MRI of the head? Or someone who's dreaming? Would it be just blank? And like, would it make any difference if we alchemized the scanner or someone dreamed it? - Equius or the shittier Equius might know how to operate one, I guess."  
  
"Okay, no, you cannot do science with the horse guys, that is just self-destructive on a whole new level even for you. Go look for your library, I'm gonna survey the natives to figure out whose piss hat that is." He hopped off the edge and floated down.  
  
Karkat decided that his first scientific priority was going to figure out how much weight you had to load onto a god-tier to achieve normal gravity-acceleration towards the ground. Because of science. Fuck people who can fly.  
  
He noticed an asshole in a red sweater walking down an idiotic twisting staircase towards him. Fuck that guy, too. He hauled ass out of there.  
  
About ten minutes later he angrily kicked open a locked Prospitian mop-closet door, having worked himself up to a perfectly rational moment of existential anxiety regarding _The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Conquerors, Spattered With The Viscera Of Its Weak And Decadent People,_ by Troll Ursula K. Le Guin, and the potential existence of a starving little chess kid locked in there being scared of mops, and oh fuck, that would be so fucking sad.  
  
This sort of behavior did _not_ qualify as a "panic attack," whatever those were supposed to be, and anyway he only did it like once a day at most, so fuck Terezi and Lalonde. He was not going to mention this to them.  
  
The door opened to an ocean of his fucking blood on a black shore with mutant red bloodpushers embedded in it.  
  
 _Okay, yeah, there was pretty much no way LOPAH wasn't going to be behind that door._  
  
(He was not going to mention this to _anyone._ It was almost laughably symbolic of all his mental problems, assuming he actually had those, which of course he did.)  
  
Well, maybe he could find his hive, anyway. He had some Troll Laura Kinsale stuff in there he hadn't reread in a while.  
  
He walked along the shore looking for a familiar landmark. The place didn't look quite the same; there was no haze, and the sky was different, black and sort of charred- and melted-looking, like it was made of glass that had gotten way too hot.  
  
Maybe some ancestor's planet was mixed in. It was starless, but not empty; stuff was written up there. Eight-character sequences that looked like captchalogue codes.  
  
He memorized a few of them to try when he woke up. One of the easier ones was "FUCKTHIS". Karkat was confident that whatever object that code produced would be extremely helpful. "twn9nc9n". Who even says that, asshole, the word is "rape."  
  
As he rounded one of those unnervingly thrumming bloodpushers, he saw what appeared to be a hivestem-sized stack of giant black and gray books about a half-mile inland. Well, that was nice of the dreambubble.  
  
Ha, no, it was some kind of trap. He headed towards it anyway. As he walked, he found other outsized books scattered on the ground:

_Troll Constantine's Sword: The Subjugglators and the Yellowbloods - A History, With Full-Color Photos!_  
  
 _Troll Orientalism_  
  
 _Odd Troll Girl Out: The Overt Culture Of Spontaneous Mob Executions In Girls_

Battered, smeared with his blood, and with most of the pages ripped out:

_Talking With Your Hands, But In The Non-Violent Way: A Complete Photographic Guide To Alternian Sign Language_

And:

_Oh God No Why Can't I Wake Up_

On closer examination, the contents of the monsterbook pile had been bound with cullskin, which was kind of ostentatious. Set into the lowest spine was a door made of lashed-together femurs. Karkat opened it and steeled himself for, like, a million fucking Paper Ogres or some shit.  
  
Okay, this actually was a pretty nice library. Except for that idiotic channel carved into the black stone floor for blood to run through, but that was an architectural feature everywhere here. The rough black obsidian shelves were very full, and ran up physics-defyingly high, something like twenty stories.  
  
There were no ladders or stairs - this was a video game, after all. You got to the books by means of erratically-spaced knotted ropes and platforms, some spiked, on fire, falling apart, or in constant silent motion. Wiggler stuff.  
  
There was a front desk, with a big red fresh-looking bloodstain where a libribarbarian would ordinarily have been sharpening her axe. Whose memory was this place, anyway? Someone else's planet, but with his own subconscious throwing masochistic bloody shit around like a self-hating branchbeast with hemorrhoids?  
  
He wiped the blood off the computer embedded in the desk, using one of the cleaning rags he kept captchalogued specifically for quickly wiping up spills of his blood, and did a few catalog searches. Oh, hell yes, there was a romance section like three stories tall, and it only started like a thirty-foot climb up.  
  
Following a regrettably unchallenging ten minutes of generic platformer hoofbeastshit, he found and captchalogued _A High-Spirited Auspistice Interferes In The Affairs Of Her Allies And Enemies In Ways That Appear Impulsive And Haphazard, But Which In Fact Are Cunningly-Planned And Lead To Satisfactorily Filled Quadrants For All._ Classic Troll Georgette Heyer, though there was that uncomfortable moment of bloodism when Sophie goes to retrieve the heirloom doomsday device from the villainous yellowblood usurer.  
  
He climbed a little higher to get a look around.  
  
 _Fuck you, sweater jerk, don't follow me around!_ A pair of white eyes was looking haughtily at him from another shelf.  
  
Or, no, this was some other sweater, one who wasn't even wearing the sweater. Also, he was a god-tier, and younger, probably not even seven sweeps. He'd clearly been there a while, given that he'd cleared out part of a four-foot-tall oversized shelf so he could sit in it. He glowered at Karkat, then made a show of going back to his book.  
  
 _Sucks to be you, sweater, I'm not leaving yet._ Karkat picked out six more books of his own, then rappelled back down to the floor and found a chair where he could see the door.  
  
A pretty long time later, when he had satisfyingly plowed through three books, his nutrition sac growled insistently. It occurred to him that he ordinarily would have woken up by now. It had to have been at least eight hours, probably more. Not that he minded, but it was just kind of weird; he didn't think he'd been any more exhausted and strung-out than was his ordinary existential state.  
  
Was there even anything to eat in here? Dream food didn't fill you up in real life, but it made you feel less hungry in the dream. But, ugh, he wasn't about to try eating those big creepy bloodpushers.  
  
He got up and walked along the shelves, trying to think of a way to wake himself up. He glanced back up at where the sweater had been; his spot was so high up that he was invisible. Well, falling off a shelf that high up would work, he guessed. He started up again.  
  
When he got up to that level, he saw that the little doomed sweater had fallen asleep among the pile of books he'd collected, with his head cushioned on his arms and his hood wilting over one eye. This was, for some reason, adorable, which in its turn, for some reason, pissed Karkat off.  
  
He hauled himself up onto the shelf and threw a book at him. The sweater twisted out into the air and kicked at Karkat's head, which Karkat turned away without any trouble, god-tier-enhancements-not-withstanding. "Calm the hell down, asshole, I need to ask you something."  
  
The sweater looked narrowly at him and lowered himself back down to just above Karkat's eye-level. "Yeah, I don't want to talk to you either. Tell me where I can get something to eat around here and I'll be out of your way."  
  
He belatedly formed up his usual smug jackass expression and shook his head. "What do you mean, no?" He drew a zero in the air. "Then what do you eat?" Gesture towards his white eyes. "Yeah, I get it, asshole, you're a fucking ghost, but I know you guys eat. And what is this, some sort of sign-language challenge day you're doing to passive-aggressively mess with your catgirl and - Carlos?"  
  
Quickly-suppressed murderface, gesture towards throat, "x" formed with his forearms. "Oh. Uh. Sorry, then. - how the _fuck_ did that happen?"  
  
The explanation apparently not being something Karkat's fake-signing vocabulary could be expected to encompass, he retrieved a palmhusk from his sylladex and angrily tapped out a response on it: "It's rude and triggering t9 ask a pers9n 9ne d9es n9t kn9w a69ut his disa6ilities, especially 9ne wh9 96vi9usly hails fr9m a d99med timeline, s9mething which is 96vi9usly indicative 9f events which the differently-a6led individual might n9t want t9 fucking talk a69ut."  
  
"Okay, okay, fine, sorry!" He hated when this guy was right.  
  
The sweater settled down a little. After an awkward moment, he nervously typed something else, then climbed back onto the shelf and showed it to Karkat: "I have s9me canned f99d captchal9gued, 6ut I can't 9pen it."  
  
Karkat retrieved his sickle and roughly slashed the lids off of two of the cans of beans he produced. (Were these the Mayor's?) The sweater snatched one can and folded the lid in half to use as a spoon, hunching over it defensively in his corner. Looked like ghosts did get hungry.  
  
He finished before Karkat, and Karkat uncomfortably pushed the last of his in his direction. The sweater polished it off hurriedly, flushed bright red with embarrassment. He even drank all the beany water, jegus. This done, he kind of collapsed against the wall and shut his eyes.  
  
Karkat said, "So. Exactly why haven't you gone out to find a can opener, Carlos Brain Hero?"  
  
He got out his palmhusk again and typed into it blind: "Kankri. It's n9t like I can starve t9 death."  
  
"Fine, Carlos Kankri. Jegus, how long have you even been in here?"  
  
Shrug. "It t99k me a l9ng time t9 find this place again. If I leave, I might n9t 6e a6le t9 c9me 6ack."  
  
"I can't even begin to describe everything that was wrong with that statement, so. This was your planet?"  
  
"Yes. The Land 9f Hem9gl96in and W9rds. I f9und the li6rary during the game, 6ut didn't have time t9 read."  
  
"In your guys' main timeline, you were all in the game for three sweeps."  
  
"I died f9r the final time a69ut f9ur weeks int9 the sessi9n. They were 6usy weeks."  
  
"What happened?"  
  
"A l9t - that sh9uld 6e 96vi9us even t9 a pers9n 9f y9ur clearly-limited intellence and tact - 6ut m9stly Kurl9z Makara. Like I said, I d9n't want t9 talk a69ut it."  
  
"Oh, that Carlos. So did he go on a typical clown murder rampage, or -"  
  
The sweater sat up and held up a hand, looking as if he was listening to something, then abruptly captchalogued all of his books and jumped up out of the shelf. "What the fuck?"  
  
Karkat heard the door open and tensed, taking his sickle up again. There were two heavy footsteps, then silence. After a few seconds of tense waiting, a floating purple figure appeared around the edge of the bookshelves and looked at him in the blank, creepyfuck way that guy looked at most things.  
  
This was another doomed iteration, of course - he was in a godhood, his lips weren't sewn shut, and he looked older than any other mimes Karkat had seen; at least twelve sweeps, maybe more. It was hard to tell with bluebloods.  
  
Anyway, the guy was fucking huge, and swinging two clubs as big as Karkat's legs idly in one hand. He ascended to Karkat in a lazy, consciously menacing way. "Hey, motherfucker, where's the _other_ nubby-horned little mutant motherfucker."  
  
"Go fuck yourself with those things," Karkat suggested. "Do you want another version of me, or what?"  
  
"What the fuck do I care about you. I want the mealy-mouthed little motherfucker what _killed my matesprit."_  
  
Great story there, sweater, you got all the important details. "You're all ghosts now, asshole. What are you even going to do, triple-kill him? Just go find your Leijon and leave me alone."  
  
Damnit, clowns moved fast. He pinned Karkat's body painfully against the shelf with one club, holding the other over his head. Karkat darted his sickle up to cross the mime's throat. What the hell was the point of all this, did the lunatic not realize he'd just wake up?  
  
"Where. The motherfuck. Is. He."  
  
"Wow, Carlos, I have really underestimated you, you just laid an excellent groundwork for a productive conversation, and I really have to fucking commend you -"  
  
He brought the club down hard on Karkat's head.

-

Karkat sat up blearily, creating an blaring cascade of horns. Gamzee was sitting against the wall drawing with his own bloody fingers.  
  
"Gamzee. If I recall correctly, we _talked_ about you expressing yourself creatively by means of your own blood. We had a very long talk about that, in fact. Do you remember the talk? Perhaps it will jog your memory if I remind you that half of the words said therein were "fuck" and "stupid," because that is fucking stupid."  
  
"Hey, brother, you slept a real long time there."  
  
"No, stop bleeding on things. Stop bleeding on things _right now."_  
  
"I ain't motherfucking done with this miraculous work of art."  
  
"Is it another fucking picture of the merciful messiahs?" It was another fucking picture of the merciful messiahs. He was holding hands with them. "Your picture of the merciful messiahs is finished. Now let me look at your hands. - Your ancestor just hit me over the head with a big fucking club, by the way."  
  
"Aw."  
  
That sound indicated that Gamzee understood that Karkat's words described a bad thing, and regretted its badness, but that he did not presently feel intellectually equipped to respond with more substance. That still happened sometimes. Karkat got his first-aid kit out of his sylladex and began awkwardly sticking bandaids on Gamzee's fingertips.  
  
"Yeah, he was trying to kill my ancestor. With which desire I sympathize, but I don't think he can actually do that in any useful way."  
  
"Nah, bro, probably can't kill him. Maybe fuck up his mind by means of his dark ancestral chucklevoodoos."  
  
Karkat declined to comment on the obvious fakeness aspect of the dark ancestral chucklevoodoos.  
  
"Well, his mind's already pretty fucked up."  
  
"Aw."  
  
"Don't fucking aw at that."  
  
"Okay."

-

The code "FUCKTHIS" yielded a sickle slightly crappier than his own. "twn9nc9n" would have made an ornate golden key with sharp spikes in inconvenient places, except it cost way fucking more than Karkat felt like spending. Whatever it unlocked had probably died with the sweater's Incipisphere, anyway.  
  
After some thought, he duplicated a bunch of the Mayor's canned food and Tab, a can opener, and some silverware, then captchalogued the whole mess.  
  
...why the _fuck_ were all these books still in his sylladex?


	2. Chapter 2

With one thing and another (rereading new books until they were memorized, extended argument/feelings jam with Dave about embarrassing things, walking in on Kanaya biting Lalonde and hyperventilating because Blood seriously had not been the right fucking aspect for him, stairs) Karkat didn't sleep for another couple days.

When he finally did, he was back in the library, in the chair where he'd been reading. The place stank of rotting guts. Approaching the bookshelf where doomed!sweater had been hiding, he found a new trail of dried red blood down the side, mostly cleaned off now.

The sweater dropped down from above, looking sullen, with a bloody cleaning rag in one hand and his palmhusk in the other. Karkat said, "Good work, god-tier. So you died again?"

"Three times. Thank y9u f9r aff9rding me that unique fucking 9pp9rtunity."

He'd had that typed up in advance. That must be what god-tier Seer of Blood powers did for you.

"Please explain to me why it was my fault that your killer clown wants to double-kill you for killing a catgirl billions of sweeps before I was hatched and in another universe. Explain that. Because a lot of things are my fault, but I can't figure out how I could've helped with that one."

Glare. "He'd never f9und this place 6ef9re. I've 6een careful. It was y9ur mem9ry 9f y9ur 9wn land that 9pened a way in."

"And you're solving this problem by... just staying in here, where he knows he can find you? Not leaving, like a reasonable ghosty douchebag."

"I've sealed him 9ut again. He's luckily n9t the m9st lucid gh9st in the afterlife."

"Then why the rock? Not that it would even work, I'm sure he could smash it."

The sweater rubbed his eyes, leaving a small smear of his blood on his brow. "The r9ck is sym69lic."

"The rock is a wiggler putting a chair in front of the closet door to keep the undead horde in there. To be clear, you're not actually the undead horde in this metaphor, you're the wiggler. Whatever, none of my business, I brought you a doomsday present." He dumped all the stuff he'd alchemized out on the floor.

The sweater's empty eyes widened. After a frozen moment, he tapped out awkwardly, "Is this supp9sed t9 be an ap9l9gy, 9r d9 y9u want s9mething fr9m me?"

"I have no idea either what you think I have to apologize for, or what you think anyone might want from you." It was usually hard to tell which way ghosts were looking with those fucked-up white eyes, but he was staring at the food like it was pointing a really big gun at him or something. This was so pathetic. "Do what you gotta do, asshole, I'm out."

Karkat stalked off to let his moronic ancestor get on with devouring limp vegetables until he made himself ghost-sick. He gathered up as many books as his sylladex could hold, including legal thrillers for Terezi and vampire and wizard crap for Kanaya and Lalonde. (Gamzee didn't like to read, who the hell knew whether the Mayor did, and fuck Dave for impugning the inherent nobility of Bookquest.)

Maybe it would all still be there when he woke up. In the meantime, he sat down, keeping his sickle with him in case of mime attack, and started in on a Troll Nora Roberts book.

Goddamn it, why did those stains behind the desk still look fresh? Why did the whole library stink? This would be such a nice place if it weren't full of blood, doom, and ancestors. Fuck all three of those things.

A ways into the murder plotline, someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped. The sweater, looking uncomfortable and with what looked like mustard stains on his sleeves, handed him the sickle. "Thank y9u. Y9ur help was appreciated."

"It wouldn't have been necessary if you'd use your fucking sponge for something other than devising masochistic masturbation scenarios. Keep the goddamn sickle, I've got better ones."

"I can't use it. I d9n't have a strife speci6us."

"Yeah? Well, here, I've solved that problem for you with my correctly-functioning pan: go find a version of you that's _not_ wearing that outfit, and beat his specibus out of him with your bare god-tier hands. You can sell tickets, make a fortune in worthless ghost money, and use it to buy yourself some fucking food."

The sweater bristled and stalked away. "Seriously, dude, you are the shittiest conceivable dead god -"

At that point, the rock exploded. Karkat jumped to his feet, grabbing up the inferior sickle. The shittiest conceivable dead god was, of course, hiding again, leaving his non-dead non-god descendant to deal with the _other_ dead god. The mime charged at him, both clubs raised and roaring.

The sweater dropped out of the air onto his head, momentarily knocking him to the floor, and hurled the clubs out of the way, one of them banging Karkat's right eye. At least he was fast. Kankri waved impatiently to the remnants of the door, and Karkat flipped him off and ran for it.

The fucking clown grabbed his leg and slammed him to the floor hard. A split-second later a loud smack and an angry squeaking noise told him the same had happened to Kankri. That noise was probably meant to be a complaint about murderclown's failure to appropriately tag his homicidal rampage.

The clown flipped Karkat like a grubcake and raised his huge fucking fist above his face.

Karkat muttered, "Fuck both of you assholes."

-

He woke up, shut his eyes again, and put both arms over them for good measure. "Turn your glowy thing off, Kanaya."

"Karkat, are you aware that you just cursed at us, fell off the couch, and then somehow rolled all the way under Rose's worktable? It was an impressive distance."

"- maybe? Fucking - give me a second, jegus." He squeezed his eyes open. He was, in fact, under the table, at which Kanaya and Lalonde were sitting. Fuck both of those assholes. He opened his sylladex and squinted at it.

Lalonde asked, "What are you doing under there, Mr. Vantas?"

 _"Penance_ for my manifold _sins,_ leave me alone." He crawled out, his head splitting, and stumbled over to the wastebasket, where he vomited up everything he'd eaten since childhood, plus - canned mustard? Fuck Kankri a second time for good measure, that had to be his fault, by means of some dreambubble shenanigans he didn't want to think about.

Kanaya said to Lalonde quietly, "Please lock up those bottles somewhere."

"I did warn him not to drink any of it undiluted."

Karkat rasped, "Go perform abdominal surgery on yourselves, this is the very last time I do you a fucking favor." He hauled himself upright and over to the table, ejected the books into a pile on the floor, and laid back down next to it, covering his eyes again. That felt better.

Kanaya and Lalonde knelt down and started picking through the pile. Lalonde said, "Oh, this is an Alternian version of that series I told you two about. - It looks like Phèdre is supposed to be a mutant, and Joscelin is - a disgraced Legislacerator? The Subjugglator must be Melisande. That's an interesting choice."

"Hm. - Karkat, please sit up. Where did all these romance novels come from?"

"One, no, I will not sit up, I will lie on this cold metal floor shaking my fist ineffectually at existence as a general concept for as long as I fucking like, fuck you very much. And two, obviously I get trashy fiction every time Gamzee's ancestor bashes my head in. This is like Mystical Fucking Clown Powers 101, get a pen."

"I'm sorry, I guess that my schoolfeeding did not include that course. Why did Kurloz bash your head in?"

"Because he's a fucking clown!" He climbed unsteadily to his feet. "Someone - kinda point me in the direction of the coffee pod."

"You might try opening your eyes," suggested Lalonde.

"Not going to happen -"

He rammed his bulge into the corner of the table, and found it necessary to invent like twelve innovative new curse words. Kanaya patiently pushed him into a chair. "I will get you coffee and something to cover your eyes. Stay still."

"Just stop glowing and I will!"

"I am not glowing."

"Hoofbeastshit." He buried his head in his arms.

Lalonde said, "More seriously, Mr. Vantas, I have tested a number of methods to transport dream objects out of their bubbles, and have yet to succeed. I'm unwilling to wave this phenomenon away as merely "mystical fucking clown powers.""

"Oh, well, then, how about if I call them "ancestral chucklevoodoos!" Give that one a try, see if it works for you."

"...no. No, I'm afraid that that didn't help at all."

"Then I invite you to find the extra-murdery iteration of the guy yourself and try to get something more informative out of him than a stream of "motherfucking"s." Kanaya lifted his chin and placed a pair of glasses on his face. "- these had better not be Equius's."

"I have cleaned them thoroughly," she said, offended, setting the coffee down.

He took them off and opened his eyes a little so as to glare at her with greater facility. "Don't put dead people's shit on me!" He started in on the coffee.

Lalonde pressed, "You encountered an iteration of the elder Mr. Makara who talks, then?"

"- yeah, he didn't mess his mouth up in that timeline, I guess. Also he's an adult, and he's like three hundred pounds of muscle. So of course his afterlife's work's just repeatedly murdering _my_ useless ancestor."

Dave said, "Come on, you'd use eternity the same way, don't say you wouldn't."

"When did you even get here, stop floating everywhere so people can't hear you come in. And fuck you, it's sick. He's six sweeps old, he doesn't have a strife specibus, and I think the clown's the one who killed him the first time. He hadn't eaten for all eternity because he was hiding in this bloodsoaked library, so he just reads all the time to take his mind off food."

Dave zeroed in on the important part of that: "So you found your library. What did you bring me, sweetie?"

Karkat handed him a Troll Bertrice Small novel. "Here, you'll love it."

Kanaya said in concern, "Did you give him something to eat?"

"- of course I _fed_ him, Kanaya, Jegus!"

Lalonde was stacking the books into themed piles. She said thoughtfully, "Most of these are Alternian, but some appear to be Beforan. What sort of library was this?"

"It was a memory of his planet, but there was stuff I recognized all over, so maybe it just gives you whatever you're looking for. Stupid game shit or stupid dream bubble shit."

"- Your eye's bruising," said Kanaya, frowning. "Was that Kurloz?

He poked it to confirm that and winced. "No, that one was Kankri. Fuck that guy." He put his head in his hands. "Well, he's fucked anyway, the murderclown's probably ghost-corpse-camping him so he can double-kill him a few dozen more times."

That was such a sick image. He kind of wished he hadn't drunk the coffee. Not that he'd be any help in a fight between two god-tiers, even if he did end up back in the library when he fell asleep.

But he felt shitty about leaving the idiot alone, now that he was thinking clearly.

Kanaya said worriedly, "That is not supposed to happen. I mean, I do not recall injuries from dreams bleeding into reality before."

"It's not a reassuring development," agreed Lalonde. "Mr. Vantas, you've found this library and encountered these two ghosts how many times now?"

"Twice."

"Next time you're ready to fall asleep, try to tell myself and Terezi at least half an hour in advance. We may be able to track you if we're all asleep at the same time. It would be best if we could isolate why this is happening, if only to prevent more serious injury. And we may be able to use it to bring some more useful items out of the dream bubbles. - Not that I have any objection to the books, which are very nice to have."

Dave said, "First priority is apple juice.

Karkat finished off his coffee. "Strider, your human beverages are not as important as me not being murdered by a motherfucking clown every time I go to sleep. Our first priority will be some goddamn sopor slime."

-

The library was silent, nearly lightless, and permeated by a hot, stinking wind blowing through the shattered doorframe. The floor was littered with bone splinters and shards of rock.

The path fucked!Kankri had followed was easily-readable in the bloodstains. He'd died once there on the floor, again hovering above a platform halfway up the nearest bookshelf, and again on top of a table beyond it. Blue blood started to mix in with the red here, finally.

Karkat should probably stay put and wait for Terezi and Lalonde, but his overactive sense of guilt obliged him to see how many times the dumbass had died alone after Karkat had woken up and drunk two cups of coffee to keep himself that way. He followed the trail.

Four, five, six. On the floor, up against a bookshelf, on the floor again with the blood tracing a disturbingly clear image of someone very large crouching over someone very small and slamming his head against the floor until it cracked.

Fucking clowns.

The sickle, which he'd dropped when the clown had pulled him to the floor, was wedged halfway through the back of an overturned chair, coated in red like pretty much everything else. He worked it out and held onto it, captchaloguing his good one. Fuck the FUCKTHIS sickle, he didn't care if he lost it again.

The trail led disturbingly into the invisible corner past the last shelf on the left. A seventh death against the corner of the top of a bookshelf, with a clear handprint (indigo this time) scrabbling to hold on. At least he was putting more distance between one death and the next now.

Karkat rounded the final corner. Kankri was lying against the wall, his eyes half-open and somehow blanker than normal. He wasn't looking much like a troll at this point, more of a pile of bloody fabric, but he was breathing, very slowly.

Karkat knelt down next to him, shakily lowering his sickle to Kankri's throat. "Uh. Okay. Look, I'm gonna go ahead and kill you again - _fuck_ this, why are you so _useless_ \- You'll revive pretty fast, okay, so -"

He was still hesitating when the goddamn clown jumped him again.

-

He didn't wake up.


	3. Chapter 3

Karkat opened his eyes foggily to a golden ceiling patterned with sun and clouds.

He shut them again in self-defense. _I'm not watching this again. Jack can murder me with my eyes closed this time, it's not like it'll hurt his feelings._

It took him a few seconds to recognize the irrationality of that thought. He sat up cautiously, concerned his train of thought might have summoned Jack Noir into existence to stab or incinerate him yet again. He was in a pretty natural place to find Jack, actually - a Prospitian prison cell.

The door, of fucking course, had a keyhole that looked like a perfect fit for the "twn9nc9n" key.

His head was fucking killing him, and his fingers and toes were numb with cold. Kankri was on his side on the floor beside him, breathing harshly. It was hard to say whether he'd revived and been beaten down again since before.

Karkat carefully lifted him up a little. Kankri squinted white eyes at him and fumbled weakly for his arm.

"Fucking _clowns,"_ said Karkat, wincing when the words made his head ring. He checked his sylladex - empty. The FUCKTHIS sickle was gone, too, of course.

"So I could, I don't know, throw you against the wall or something. Give me your opinion of that idea! Yeah, you don't know what's going on, why am I talking to you. Or I could - _fuck_ this, why am I so _useless."_

Kankri reached up for him again, red moisture trickling from his less-bruised eye. Oh, god. This was why it was so hard to get to god-tier. "Fuck you, okay? Just. Fuck you." Karkat gathered his idiot ghost awkwardly into his lap.

Kankri slumped into his chest with bone-shaking shudder, his breath wheezing and bubbling, and made a creaky sound of misery. "Goddamnit! I'm sorry, I just - why am I even apologizing to you, this is all you, it's not my fault. I mean, look. As has already been confirmed many, many times, I am a _pathetic failure_ as a troll. Just - saw my horns off, paint me brown, and call me the Karkat human. Actually, no, the humans are better trolls than me at this point, Lalonde probably wouldn't hesitate to tear you in half. Maybe I'm some kind of chess guy. Fuck, I've solved the mystery at last! We're a couple of chess guys doing troll cosplay, that's what happened here."

"Anyway, that is the extent to which I am failing to kill you right now. I am failing to kill you even though, one, I loathe you (platonically), two, _you're already fucking dead,_ and three, if you were thinking straight you'd _want_ me to kill you."

Kankri made a noise that might have been meant as a question, or might've just been him trying to catch his breath. He was looking up at Karkat with foggy anxiety, his sweat-soaked hair plastered to his face.

"Yeah, so. I guess I'm just going to, uh, hold onto you like this until you double-die again. Hope you're okay with that! Because that's all I've got. I'm done."

The ghost caught a wadded fistful of Karkat's blood-stiff shirt in one hand and tried, wheezing, to sit up straighter. _Fuck you._ Karkat freed a hand and helped him. Kankri snuggled closer and sighed.

"Oh, god. You poor little creep. It's been _billions_ of fucking sweeps since anyone's been nice to you, hasn't it."

Karkat settled against the wall, hugged the stupid ghost, and waited for the fucking clown to show up and tear them to pieces.

He fell asleep.

 

-

 

He didn't wake up.

Kankri was still ghost-breathing, a heavy, feverish mass curled shivering against his chest. They were both soaked with cold sweat and drying blood. The sight of red blood out in the open still made Karkat flinch, and it didn't help that it was mostly Kankri's and they were both mutants or chess guys or whatever here.

It was slowly dusking on Karkat's possibly-concussed dream-phantom brain (too many goddamn qualifiers on that brain) that something was seriously wrong. As in, even more seriously wrong than the statement "I am presently cuddling Kankri" would imply.

_Why haven't I woken up? And where the **fuck** are Terezi and Lalonde?_

There was a window up the wall behind him, which he could probably get a look out, but he'd have to put his dumbass ancestor down, and he'd said he wasn't going to do that. Dream bubbles being dream bubbles, being able to see out wouldn't tell him much, anyway.

One of his legs had gone numb, and he shifted it, eliciting a tiny pained noise from Kankri. He patted him on the head. "Sorry, asshole, you're heavy. I'd tell you to go on a diet if you hadn't been on one for all eternity -"

The door clicked as it unlocked. Karkat had time to think, _If that's Terezi or Dave, this will be the most humiliating moment of my life, bar none._ Being a jackass, he felt a sudden jackass-impulse to dump his dumbass ghost on the floor.

It was the clown, grinning. Karkat clutched his dumbass ghost tight. "Leave him the fuck alone for once, shitsponge! He's hurt, he's unarmed, he's literally a _third_ your fucking size -"

The clown kicked them both across floor in a casual motion of one trunkbeast leg. Karkat rolled over on top of Kankri protectively, and Kankri cried out; there'd been a cracking sound there. _"Goddamnit,_ Carlos, leave him _alone!"_

Makara caught Karkat's collar one-handed and lifted him up with no effort. Karkat was frozen and sore all over, but he got in a good kick on his face. Better than he'd done the last couple times. "What is even _wrong_ with you?! Go kick somebody else around!"

"That's _just what I'm doing._ Motherfucker."

It occurred to Karkat somewhat belatedly that he was also hurt, unarmed, and a third the clown's fucking size.

He threw Karkat casually against the opposite wall and was on top of him again before Karkat could catch his breath to move, shoving his left wrist into a gold manacle affixed to it. He pinned the right one with a massive hand, then smiled sleepily.

Fuck him why did he have to look so much like Gamzee.

What followed was really probably pretty mundane, as torture went. Karkat wasn't an expert on the subject, he didn't really like that sort of movie, but it didn't strike him as very creative. It just hurt a lot.

He started out with swearing and insults, that being his default mode of existence anyway, but moved on to crying and screaming a lot faster than he'd have preferred. Then came people's names, specifically Terezi, Dave, Kanaya, Lalonde, and Gamzee (in that order, and _fuck_ he could never tell them that); then begging and promises (he could never tell anyone that).

It got hard to remember what he'd been saying from one moment to the next, so some of it was contradictory or didn't make sense, which was kind of fucking embarrassing. Around the time the last bone in his right arm was crushed and the clown moved on to his hand, he was in the middle of something stupid like:

"- please stop please don't kill me fuck you I'm not yours please I'm like fucking Gamzee's or something I guess fucking _please_ I want to go home please fuck you I'll do anything please please just kill me and get it _over_ with please fuck you I'll do anything I'll _fuck you fuck you fuck you_ please kill me please please fucking please -"

Some abstracted part of his mind observed that "please" had stopped sounding like a real word. He should make up another one for this sort of situation, or maybe like a whole progression of shrieking inanity. This was the burden that fell to him as the descendant of that other dumbass who died like this. Or maybe the dumbass was _his_ descendant? He hadn't really been paying attention during the disgusting ectobiology thing anything please stop fucking please I just want to go _home_ anything I'll do _literally fucking anything_

"Yeah?"

The clown yanked his broken hand straight through the manacle. Karkat didn't notice he'd been screaming until he ran out of air and had to stop.

By then he had been deposited next to his dumbass ancestor, who had probably died like this a bunch of times come to think of it, except that this version couldn't say a fucking word about it.

The clown gently arranged Karkat's left hand around the grip of his sickle.

"You said you'd do _anything,_ motherfucker. So _kill the little shit."_

Kankri's eyes were open, lucid, and scared shitless. It was like looking stupidly at your own useless cowardly torn-up mirror image.

The clown wrapped one huge hand around Karkat's neck, and the other around his broken hand. He gave both a squeeze.

When the haze cleared, Karkat could hear him saying, "- start over _from the beginning,_ motherfucker. Is that what you want?"

"Oh fuck no, no no no -"

"Then kill him."

Karkat was quaking all over, and had no idea when that had started. The clown's hands were still on him, and so were Kankri's eyes. He said, "Oh _fuck_ I'm _sorry."_

He cut his dumbass ancestor's throat.

The fucking clown started over anyway.

_Kankri please don't be dead please I'm sorry I killed you I'm so sorry why does everyone always die so much please come back to life don't leave me alone here fuck you you shitty dead god I tried to help you and I hugged you when you needed it, goddamnit come **back** you asshole, I'm so fucked up, oh god I'm sorry I killed you -_

It was actually disorienting when a little brown-red shape spun around the clown and kicked him to the floor. Karkat had kind of lost the capacity to visualize what help would look like.

But oh god it was good not to have that fucking clown touching him. _Thank you Kankri please don't die again ohhh shit._ He might have blacked out for a second.

"Aw. Did I hurt your little feelings, motherfucker?"

Kankri was doing something incomprehensible with his hands. Sign language? Karkat didn't understand it and anyway he was hurt really goddamn bad and there was red shit in his eyes. He shut them. _Please don't die again please don't die again I'm scared._

"You are too motherfucking much, as if I ever once _needed_ your motherfucking _permission_ to do a thing with you."

Silence.

"You're so easy, little man. Fine. So long as we _do understand_ each other."

There was a long, disturbing sucking sound, followed by a choked gasp, a thud, and a small metallic "ting," like a coin dropped on the floor. The the door slammed shut.

He felt someone kneeling over him, and flinched away. An unsteady hand brushed his hair out of his face, and he cautiously opened one eye. Kankri was unlocking the manacle with a small golden key. He had paint smeared around his mouth.

"Oh fuck. I'm sorry." The words didn't really come out right. He was crying so hard he could barely breathe.

Kankri patted his shoulder, about as awkwardly as a reasonable person would have expected Kankri to pat someone's shoulder, then clumsily put his arms around him, just copying what Karkat'd done for him earlier because he'd probably never needed or tried to comfort someone who'd been hurt when he was alive, the smug spoiled bastard, this was so humiliating.

But Karkat needed it right now. He shut his eyes.

"I can't wake _up._ Am I dead?"

He passed out.


	4. Chapter 4

He didn't wake up.

His left arm was numb and immobile, everything hurt when he moved, and it was just so fucking cold. But Kankri was still holding him, ghost-breathing quietly into his blood-matted hair, the only warm soft thing left in the world.

Karkat was sickeningly grateful. He just needed someone right now, and he didn't really give a shit who it was. Call Dave fucking Strider to tag in when Kankri's shift's over, because Karkat Vantas is one hundred percent broken this time.

He thought of Kurloz's hands and every torn-up muscle in his worthless little body spasmed. Kankri opened his eyes and reached up anxiously to stroke his hair. Just another careful imitation of himself from the narcissistic little shit who flipped out when other people touched him.

Karkat started crying for absolutely no goddamn reason. He had been so fucking _bored_ a week ago.

"Okay," he rasped. "Okay, this is kind of an important question which I need you to answer _succinctly._ I know you can do that, I believe in you. Ready? _Are my eyes white?"_

Kankri shook his head. Good work, Kankri.

"Then why the _fuck_ can't I wake up?"

Kankri awkwardly repositioned himself to free one hand, keeping the other around Karkat's wrenched shoulders, to Karkat's relief. He was so goddamn cold and hurt, so completely terrifyingly dependant on history's most useless god-tier.

Kankri wrote in the air above them, tracing letters in bright red with his index finger:

"He can f9rm nightmares which cann9t easily 6e escaped. It's a mystical cl9wn p9wers thing."

The letters stayed put for a little less than a second, fading to black and crumbling dry into the air.

Of _course_ Kankri's god-tier powers were going to give him one more way to say stuff. But it was pretty clear why he preferred typing to writing in his own awful garish blood.

Karkat asked the important question. "How do I go _home?"_

Kankri's hand wavered. "I d9n't kn9w. 6ut he pr9mised me he w9uldn't t9uch y9u again."

Karkat remembered, very belatedly, disgusting greasy clown makeup all over Kankri's mouth. "Oh _fuck_ what did you do."

"Y9u're alive and I'm dead. It d9esn't matter."

"What did you _do?"_

The arm Kankri was holding Karkat with squeezed him involuntarily, like he thought Karkat was his stuffed growlbeast. It hurt like hell, but Karkat didn't have the will to complain.

Without seeming to notice what the left hand was doing, Kankri's right one wrote, "T9 esta6lish s9me c9ntext, I sh9uld start 9ut 6y saying that it's 6een my 96servati9n that 69th g9d-tier status and gh9st status tend t9 muddle s9cial signals in a num6er 9f ways. 9rdinarily murder attempts, and 9f c9urse actual murder, are indicative 9f plat9nic hate. H9wever, the lack 9f permanency inherent in -"

"No, no, shut up! Shut up right now! Fuck you, you can _not_ agree to be his kismesis, he's out of his fucking mind!"

Kankri's hand was mostly steady. "I c9uldn't think 9f anything else t9 d9."

"You don't even _hate_ him. You're scared of him and you can't fight back -"

"It's wr9ng f9r him t9 inv9lve 9ther pe9ple in this. I'll figure s9mething 9ut 9nce y9u're awake."

"And aren't you - supposed to be fucking _celibate_ or some hoofbeastshit?"

Kankri made a small angry noise. "Please st9p. I have" He decided he didn't like that sentence and smeared it away, getting his fancy god-tier sleeve all bloody. "I d9n't want t9 d9 this. D9n't make it harder."

Karkat had stopped crying because he was busy yelling, that mostly worked for him, but it was fucking starting again, fuck everything, he _hated_ the afterlife, he didn't want the dumb asshole trying to keep him warm to fucking _extra-die_ for it.

"- just. Look. I don't know if it even counts when _I_ happen to be the object of the self-sacrificing gesture, but you're kind of veering in the direction of a Heroic double-death, asshole."

Very long pause. The next thing he wrote was faster, angrier, and slightly drippier. "I d9n't kn9w if y9u're just t99 stupid and self-a6s9r6ed t9 have th9ught 9f this, 6ut I d9 have self-interested m9tives. I'm sick 9f 6eing hungry and I'm _really_ sick of being _al9ne."_

"May6e that's stupid en9ugh t9 keep this fr9m l99king her9ic t9 the magic cl9ck. I d9n't kn9w, and I d9n't think I care! I wish you'd never fed me 9r t9uched me 9r said a w9rd t9 me, 6ecause I can't st9p _thinking_ about it n9w. I want f99d and I want s9me9ne t9 _talk_ t9 me. And if I can't have any9ne else, I'll take him."

He wiped the last of it up with his sleeve. It was caked black now.

Karkat said, "I'm _sorry,_ I can't even - oh, fuck, can you just please not do this! I'm tired of my friends dying because of my shitty decisions!"

Kankri covered his eyes with his bloody sleeve, and Karkat tried uselessly to will the cowardly little shit to roll over and hug him again. If Karkat needed someone to hold onto right now, Kankri must need it a lot worse. _You poor stupid douche. No one deserves this shit._

It wasn't _fair,_ Karkat wished he could just. Take the idiot back to the meteor somehow, let him eat all he wanted, pay attention to him until he wasn't such a terrified wreck of a ghost. Why did the only version of this guy he could stand have to have things so shitty?

Yeah, he could probably only stand him _because_ he had things so shitty. They were both such complete assholes.

Karkat said finally, "I need to sit up. I want to be able to see the goddamn door." Kankri helped him lean up against the wall, carefully but not very competently. He didn't know how to touch people.

He tried to pull away. Karkat grabbed his stupid little hood and dragged him in.

After a frozen second of obvious terror, Kankri caught hold and squeezed like he was drowning and Karkat was an inflateable quackbeast. This hurt like hell. Could he seriously not remember that he was dealing with a seriously injured guy for five fucking seconds, jegus.

But who even cared. They huddled up together in a miserable little mutant knot against the wall. This was so much better. Maybe the dumbass would even hold still long enough that they could get warm.

Karkat's nutrition sac growled, and then Kankri's did the same. Karkat said, "Sorry. I mean, sorry I accidentally fucked up your life-slash-death even worse than it already was, is what I was trying to convey."

Kankri was making the most of his brief respite with someone to hug who wouldn't hurt him. However, being Kankri, he was willing to give up a little of the first affection he'd had for billions of sweeps in order to say stuff, so he freed a hand to write with.

"S9me9ne else w9uld have led him t9 me eventually, pr96a6ly an9ther versi9n 9f myself. I d9n't think that I w9uld have given me f99d."

That was basically the worst possible thing to say about yourself, but for a variety of good reasons Karkat could summon no useful objection to the statement. He patted Kankri's back with his good hand. Kankri shivered.

They heard footsteps outside. Kankri tore himself away up into the air and wrote hurriedly, "Cl9se y9ur eyes." Karkat glared at him, and he glared back. Both of them were panicking. "This w9uld 6e 6ad en9ugh -"

The door clicked, and Kankri wiped up the sentence and whipped around, crossing his arms and turning his pissy expression more appropriately on Makara. He was hovering exactly high enough to put himself at eye level.

The clown smiled at him. "Ain't you two the sweetest thing."

Karkat had several things to say to that, but he felt like voicing them would be a really fucking bad idea if he wanted to keep Kankri ghost-alive. Also, he kept looking at the clown's hands and he wasn't sure he was even actually breathing. Fuck that guy fuck that guy fuck that guy. Just, fuck that guy.

Kankri signed something rapidly to him; it involved pointing at Karkat. "I all up and know that already." More angry signing. "In my own good time, little man." One very fast and definitive sign. "Because him bein' here gets you all good and riled up like this. C'mere."

Kankri balled his hands into fists. After a silence, he very deliberately lowered himself an inch, then stiffly signed something slower. "Now ain't you up and used to that."

Karkat had a pretty good idea what he'd been asking for, given the context, and the fact that the sign had involved his nutrition sac. He pointed at Karkat again, his jaw set.

Makara crossed his arms and smiled. Kankri signed something else very obvious; he bowed his head and clapsed his hands in front of him. _Oh fuck why can't I do anything I hate this._

"C'mon now, motherfucker, you gonna do a thing you gotta do it right."

Kankri flipped him off with both hands. Without seeming to move, the clown had one huge hand around his throat, and the other around both his ankles. "You wanna try one more time?" he asked in a low, creaky voice.

Kankri stammered out a sign, and Makara whipped his hands back. Kankri went down on his knees on the floor, head bowed and dripping ugly pink tears.

The clown knelt down and buried a hand in his hair.

Karkat gave up and shut his eyes.

He couldn't plug his ears with just one working hand. Fuck that guy, fuck Kankri for not figuring out a way out of this and being absolutely fucking terrified one hundred percent of the fucking time, and fuck himself for not being able to do a fucking thing.

Eventually the door slammed closed again. He waited to open his eyes until he heard Kankri climb to his feet and take a step towards him.

His lower lip had been chewed bloody and there was a creepily precise little cut in the black shadow below his right eye, but he otherwise looked physically okay. The expression on his face was indescribable. He sat down carefully a little distance away from Karkat.

He pulled his hand away when Karkat reached for it. Then he kind of did this thing where he crumpled up and cried into his knees.

Karkat couldn't move over there without help, so he just rasped, "When you're fucking done, just. Come here and talk to me." He was so hurt and cold and hungry and thirsty, and he didn't know what the fuck to do.

After a while Kankri crawled over and touched his shoulder. His whole face was red and swollen, and he wouldn't meet Karkat's eyes. "It's not your fault, cut that shit out. - So I don't know what the hell. Is there anything you need I can give you."

He wrote sloppily on the floor: "It's n9t fair, n9 9ne had ever kissed me 6ef9re and I just wanted s9me9ne I actually like"

End of sentence. The words stayed red longer when he didn't write on air.

It should have been a hard decision to make. Or, you know, at least to act on. But Karkat basically had no boundaries left with regard to this guy, and anyway he wanted to do it, call it terror-induced adrenaline or confused narcissism/self-loathing or pathetic gratitude or just basic clinginess.

He pulled Kankri's face towards him impatiently. Kankri moved stiffly, his white eyes startled and suspicious.

 _You paranoid asshole, do you really think I'd joke with you about something like this?_ Aloud, he said hoarsely, "Sorry I'm not exactly a fucking expert at this. What can I say, you got exactly the descendant you deserve!"

Their mouths were dry and neither of them had the first idea what they were doing. Kankri was desperate and vibrating and overheated and _biting_ \- why the fuck were both of the two people Karkat had ever kissed biters - and holding Karkat's bruised-black side way too hard. It felt really good. Fuck.

They kept at it as long as they could stand, then snuggled up together in a clumsy tangle of shaky frustrated need.

Karkat muttered, "I wish I could keep you."

Kankri nodded into his neck.

They fell asleep.

-

Karkat woke up.

"Karkat what the fuck."

"Uh?"

Kankri was sleeping pretty hard up against him and not shaking anymore, it was nice and dark and warm in here, and he'd at some point gone numb and entered one of the regions of thirst/hunger at which he was intellectually conscious of needing stuff but didn't quite feel it. So Karkat felt pretty good and not immediately inclined to open his eyes, thanks.

"Hey, Terezi, you still up top? Yeah, are we inside one of the bubbles again? - Because there's a ghost in the horn pile and that's pretty weird. Just one person's opinion."


	5. Chapter 5

"Hey, Terezi, you still up top? Yeah, are we inside one of the bubbles again? - Because there's a ghost in the horn pile and that's pretty weird. Just one person's opinion."

Oh fuck you Dave you had _better_ not be on the clown's rape-Prospit we do not need that guy getting his paws on one more red-themed shithead. Karkat sat up and dislodged Kankri, who made a whiny sound and fell off the stupid horn pile face-first.

"Fuck," Karkat creaked. Kankri was looking up at the horns in a betrayed and judgmental way. Karkat could not disagree with this evaluation.

Dave said, "Hi." He handed them each a can of Tab. Kankri took two drinks, then, forgetting he could fly, scrambled back up to hide behind Karkat in an awkward shower of horns. Karkat was still absorbed in his own dehydration and ignored this.

Dave said, "Okay, status report is that you've been asleep five fucking days, Terezi and Rose have been looking for you but coming up short, and we're not in a dream bubble so I don't actually know why your obnoxiouser twin's here. - it's pretty hilarious he's wearing the same getup as Rose btw."

"Dave, you are forbidden from saying "btw" out loud, I will write it on the leader blackboard. You better have something to eat on you, and _fuck_ my _arm."_ His arm was fine. "What the fuck."

Dave said, "Did you notice how my status report was literally the best goddamn status report anyone's ever given. The sort of thing you don't really get any awards for, import initially kind of gets overlooked by the establishment, but it ends up setting a _standard,_ you know? You, on the other hand, are just going "fuck" and bitching. What even happened to your arm? Did Aradia come and rescue you guys, or what?"

 _"No one_ came for us, thanks, and the motherfucking clown broke every single bone in it - damnit maybe it's going to just kind of fade in like last time? Fuck, I'm getting down off these goddamn horns, I'm not letting you flying dunderfucks carry me."

Kankri was sticking to him like glue, watching Dave like he might at any moment fail to tag an act of ghost sexual assault. Karkat patted his shoulder. "We're fine, dumbass, calm down. - do you even know what humans are? Like is that one of the many things your largely-worthless seer powers missed? What are those even _for,_ exactly?"

Kankri gestured urgently at the annex of can town in the corner. "Okay yeah."

While they decimated the Mayor's domain like the alien invasion that they were, Dave diplomatically turned his back on them and started alerting the rest of the meteor to their presence.

"Rose, he's - hi, Kanaya, you've got Rose's tentaclephone, nothing weird about that. Is she not awake yet? Well, _he's_ awake, he's got the ghost with him and that makes no sense. Yeah, tell the Mayor if you see him on the way, I still can't get him to answer his democracy-phone." He said to Karkat, "And obviously I got no idea how to tell Makara, if he even exists."

Kankri froze up on that one. Karkat laid a hand on his knee. "The _other_ Makara, genius. Gamzee. He exists, Strider, he's been in here being a fucking clown, see?"

There were fresh blood-scribbles all along the bottom of the wall. Where was he even getting this much blood, was he just alchemizing more when he ran out?

Dave said, "Huh. I guess so. - Okay, what happened?"

"- just -" Oh fuck he couldn't. Kankri flinched, and Karkat realized he was digging his nails into his knee. "- some shit, okay!? He died a lot. And we were in this dream-projection of the clown's Prospit, I don't know how far it extended because we were just locked in one goddamn room, and just. Fuck I need to alchemize something!"

He couldn't look at Dave, he looked at Kankri instead, _he_ fucking understood about this shit...

"You're going to make yourself ghost-vomit, dumbass." Kankri already looked sick, but was still shoveling cold canned noodles into his face with the steely-eyed determination of a dude who basically hadn't eaten for eternity and had made certain unpleasant resolutions during that time. "No, stop that right now, I'm going to rip it from your cold dead hands if you don't - _thank_ you. If you're not throwing up in five minutes, finish it off then."

Kankri nodded in sullen agreement to this ultimatum and wisely captchalogued the can and spoon as a self-control crutch. Then he took firm hold of Karkat's hand. His face was red and defensive.

Yet again, Karkat was pretty sure he looked exactly the same, and fuck that was going to get annoying.

 _"Damnit,_ we need to talk to Aradia or someone who ever knows what the hell's going on! What if you just - disappear back into the bubble again if I'm not with you?!"

Kankri nodded again, smaller this time. Karkat had maybe brought him here by touching him or kissing him or - saying he wanted him, or whatever - and who the fuck knew if getting too far from him would make him like... drift back, or something. He wished they were alone somewhere.

Dave said blankly, "That's kind of the dude's natural state, isn't it? Ghosts go in dream bubbles."

_Fuck you, Dave, this ghost happens to be mine!_

And oh god, that was not a safe or smart thought to have had.

Terezi said, "Except for Aradia, because she's weird. Glad to see you're alive, Karkat, glad to see you're dead, Kankri. This version of you is so cute and tiny! But where is your delicious sweater?"

Kankri regarded her pulled-down dragon hood with what was probably supposed to be haughty distaste, but the effect was just kind of stupid given that she couldn't see it, they were sitting on the floor holding hands and blushing like wigglers, he had a grub sauce thumbprint on his chin, and he looked permanently traumatized.

Karkat said, "Okay, did Aradia have any of her patented terrifying bubbly death wisdom for us? She'd better have, given that this is the _one_ time I actually want some terrifying bubbly death wisdom!"

"She was going to try to find the Kurloz in question, which she was planning to do in the company of many homicidal robots, who of course improve all situations! She also suggested that we attempt, if possible, to question Gamzee more deeply on the subject of dark ancestral chucklevoodooes, something which has not borne much fruit."

"Gamzee being smugly uncommunicative or absent, totally unexpected -"

Kankri tapped on Karkat's shoulder. He was pointing uncomfortably at Gamzee's drawings. "What, what did he do this time? - oh, jegus, Gamzee, you gross awful piece of _shit!"_

Kankri had been indicating a crude but expressive work of narrative art done in indigo blood, showing two dudes with nubby horns and messy hair arguing, bleeding, cuddling, and then kissing.

"How did he even - that irredeemable pungent sac of shitmusk, was he just _watching_ like a creep! That complete - what did I even do to him!?"

Kankri was failing comprehensively to hide the last two panels from Dave, who said articulately, "Karkat what the actual fuck."

"- it's how you bring people back to life and it worked, and both of you shut up!" Terezi had a special wheezy cackle reserved just for him. "Jegus fuck, the outpouring of sympathy we're getting vis-a-vis our scarringly horrific experience is just unreal! I am so touched I may have to get checked for venereal disease! - You know what, let's go." He hauled a bright-red and furious Kankri to his feet and captchalogued Can Town. "Hi, Kanaya, bye, Kanaya."

"Hello, Karkat and Kankri. I brought you some coffee." She handed him a large insulated carafe. "I suggest that you try not to fall asleep again until we have some understanding of what happened."

"Okay, thank you, and yeah fuck sleep forever. Bye."

"Where are you going?"

_"Clown hunting."_

"Oh." Pause. "Good."

Karkat waited until they had been out of earshot of the giggling for fifteen seconds before stopping and letting go of Kankri. "Okay. Uh. Do you actually want to help me find yet _another_ murderclown, or -"

Kankri grabbed his hand, looking outraged. He wrote in a big fast smear, "I D9N'T WANT T9 G9 6ACK."

"I just - okay, fine." Karkat shut his eyes and tried to think. "First we really do need to go alchemize some stuff."

They found one of the meteor's scattered Alchimeters, on one of those idiotic platforms kind of hanging in the black void of the meteor's hollowed-out center with no railing, connected to more of the same by stairs with no banister. It made no architectural sense and was creepy as fuck, like what was this, some kind of video game.

Karkat produced his usual kit for himself, including a new chair, then for Kankri made a palmhusk, the rape key, and some practical crap like blood-cleanup rags and a can opener.

He'd made notebooks of the codes he needed most often and stuck them by the alchimeters a while back. Strider kept writing weird shit in them, though. Why the fuck do you keep combining everything with amber.

The whole procedure was a little awkward given that neither of them wanted to let go of the other, and Kankri was brooding harder than any troll ghost had ever brooded. "Happy wriggling day, I got you a can opener, it's intended only partly satirically. Anything else you want?"

Kankri angrily pulled Karkat towards him and kissed him hard, teeth digging deep into Karkat's lower lip. Karkat pulled away from him, sucking away blood. "Jegus, what the fuck was that for!?"

Kankri pounded something into his new palmhusk, scowled at it a couple seconds too long, and then started to pocket it. Karkat snatched it from him.

"I kn9w y9u regret it 6ut y9u c9uld wait until I'm n9t fucking here t9 say crap like that t9 y9ur friends."

This was inarticulate enough that it was paradoxically a whole lot clearer than most of the shit Kankri said. Karkat shoved the phone back at him in frustration. "Damnit, I _don't_ regret it, it's just - she's almost kind of my ex and I don't get along with the other zillions of iterations of you - look, I'm kind of a huge asshole, okay, I'm fucking sorry! Just - fuck this, we've got other stuff to do and we need to find my stupid clown, okay? And - fucking _take_ this."

He tossed the key at Kankri. Obviously he cut the asshole's hand. "Goddamnit! I'm _sorry,_ all right!?"

Kankri licked the blood away from the puncture with a spiteful expression. Then he let go of Karkat, turned his back on him, and grabbed a cleaning rag to wrap himself up with.

Karkat was surprised by how badly he took it that Kankri wasn't touching him. He held his shit together for like five seconds, until it became clear that the asshole did not know the trick to tying a knot one-handed (teeth), then grabbed him and did it for him.

Kankri struggled uselessly and kicked him in the shins. He snarled through his teeth, "Like _fuck_ I'm letting you _disappear_ on me."

Kankri kicked him one last time, hard, then kissed him again, locking his arms tight under Karkat's and twisting one leg around his. Then he dragged them up in the air. Karkat clawed at him, then stopped because of course he'd hauled them out over the edge and there was fuck knew how long a fall there. He held the fuck on. Kankri bit down harder.

 _Fuck being a troll sometimes, no one's ever going to kiss me without trying to tear me to pieces._ But fine, if that was how the asshole wanted it. Karkat raked his fingernails across the back of Kankri's neck.

Kankri started crying like he'd flipped the Kankri Crying Switch, and then Karkat was crying, too, _fuck_ they were both so fucked up. Karkat would've wished he were dead if Kankri weren't presently making it so clear that that didn't help.

Karkat said hoarsely, "Just put us back on the goddamn platform, asshole." They whumped down in front of the alchimeter from a little too high up, then just kind of slumped there on the floor and sniffled into each other for about ten minutes.

"We are such losers," Karkat muttered. Kankri nodded. He was back in Karkat's lap at this point, and consequently Karkat's ass was numb. "You know, there's fucking couches around here, we could have panic attacks somewhere other than the floor."

But who cared. He had his ghost here, safe and warm and full of food. He'd gotten what he fucking wanted for once, and it felt good.

But it was mixed up in the weird ruined lethargy and self-disgust that sometimes came after extended panic. He wasn't really out of the golden room yet, in his head. Neither of them was.

He said, "I don't know how the fuck you stop feeling like shit. It's a continuing theme in my life, but when someone treats you that way, it's like - how do you ever feel like anything else is real again."

Kankri nodded. He typed: "I wish I didn't kn9w this was a dream. It w9uld 6e nice if I c9uld think it was real."

"It _is_ real!"

Kankri scowled at him. "F9r y9u. I'm dead. I'm n9t supp9sed t9 stay here."

"No shit, you're not supposed to even _be_ here! Yet, such is the case. How do you know we can't keep - breaking the rules like this?" Fuck it Karkat really _did_ want to keep him, that was such an awful thing to realize, because he knew damn well he probably couldn't.

Snooty raised eyebrows. "I'm the Seer 9f 6l99d. I kn9w this s9rt 9f thing. Things t9 d9 with me 6leeding. It's just 6een a while since it was s9 pertinent."

Karkat was all cried out, so he just shut his eyes. He didn't want this. "Then I'll go with you." He felt Kankri shaking his head impatiently, and he also felt another pair of ghostly hands on him, and pain and hunger and the chain and - fuck all this. "You can't go back there alone, you just can't, I can't fucking _stand_ this it's not _fair -"_

Kankri poked him in the eye. "Hey!" He focused in on Kankri's palmhusk, right up in his face, and shoved it back a little so he could actually read it:

"I did kill her."

"Wh - Meulin?"

"I was her server player. She said s9mething that made me angry, and I left my hive t9 expl9re instead 9f helping her int9 the game. She was dead 9n entry."

"Of fuck, man. I did that, too, but - I mean, we got him back that time, Feferi kissed him and we got him back -"

"Damara had t9ld me that that was p9ssi6le, 6ut I'd c9nvinced myself she was playing a j9ke 9n me. When I returned t9 my c9mputer and saw what I'd d9ne t9 Meulin, I didn't try t9 get t9 her, 9r tell any9ne else. I was ashamed and afraid, and I hid. N9ne 9f the 9nes wh9 c9uld have saved her knew until it was t99 late."

Karkat didn't even know what to say. He went with, "She would have died anyway. She died in _every_ timeline. You _all_ did." Even to him that didn't sound comforting.

Kankri glared up at him, head tucked against his chest; he hadn't moved, but his whole body was stiff, prepared for rejection. And now he was mad he wasn't getting it. "I didn't kn9w a69ut alternate timelines, 9r dream 6u66les, 9r gh9sts. I didn't kn9w I w9uld ever see her again. I th9ught that death meant 6eing g9ne f9rever, and I ch9se t9 leave my friend al9ne t9 die. 6ecause I didn't want t9 6e em6arrassed."

"S9 I just hid. I was having these idi9tic fantasies 9f keeping away fr9m every9ne and then s9rt 9f reappearing in fr9nt 9f them having d9ne s9mething very imp9rtant, s9 they w9uldn't hate me."

"After a69ut a night I decided I sh9uld really just kill myself, s9 I w9uldn't have t9 face them, and s9 they'd understand h9w 6ad I felt a69ut killing her and feel s9rry f9r me. 6ut I was t99 afraid, and I tried t9 run when Kurl9z f9und me."

"He 6r9ke my speci6us, and I tried t9 ap9l9gize and make excuses, and he did s9mething that destr9yed my v9ice, t9 make me 6e quiet. Then he t9ld me a69ut what I'd d9ne, and br9ke my skull." He stopped typing for a second. "I was upset when P9rrim made me c9me 6ack."

"She stuck you in your quest cocoon? How'd she even find you in time?"

"I didn't ask. She was t99 upset and angry t9 talk t9 me. I m9stly just sat in my hive, after that."

"Then how'd you die the last time?"

"I saw that there w9uld 6e a 6attle, and that I w9uld die there."

Karkat was all shaky now. "Oh, jegus, man. You saw yourself dying and you were just like, well, better get on with it?"

"Yes. I saw I w9uld act as a distracti9n, s9 s9me9ne else c9uld get 9ut 9f the way. It was supp9sed t9 happen that way, which in my 9pini9n (and I am the 9ne wh9 is supp9sed t9 kn9w these things) means that it was n9t suicide."

"Like fuck it wasn't, did you even _tell_ them that that's what you were doing? That that was going to happen, that you'd gone there to fucking die on them?"

"N9."

His face was impossible to read. Karkat exploded, "You complete _asshole!"_

"D9n't y9u understand that they didn't care? And they sh9uldn't have cared. That's h9w it had t9 6e."

"You self-absorbed little shit! And now you're trying to pull the same shit on me - like having to go through this once wasn't bad enough - and it's just the same masochistic narcissistic crap that made you spend eons alone! And you don't even care if you hurt people doing it!"

"I'm n9t hurting any9ne." He looked really mad now. Good. "The m9st imp9rtant thing I ever did was kill her and hide. That's the s9rt 9f pers9n I am, and it w9uld 6e a lie f9r me t9 act 9therwise. And anyway, I d9n't really matter t9 y9u except as" He stopped, flipped the Kankri Crying Switch again, and went on, "Except as a s9rt 9f reflecti9n 9f a part 9f y9urself y9u d9n't like. Y9u'll just f9rget me. "

"How can you be so persistently wrong about every single thing, in every single iteration, in every single timeline?! You matter to me and he _can't have you back."_

Pissy incompetent makeouts had yet to tidily resolve a single one of their mutual problems, but what the hell.

This time they pulled apart because they heard someone talking nearby. Kankri climbed awkwardly off of him, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, then wrote balefully in the air, "I D9N'T think this is a pr9ductive use 9f 9ur time."

"Oh, come _on,_ Mr. Celibate-for-Eons. If you tell me that you wanted to do _anything_ else with your brief escape into the world of the living, then I will laugh in your fucking face."

Kankri's face went bright red. He tapped out petulantly, "Eat. Didn't y9u want t9 find y9ur 9wn enemy?"

"My - Gamzee's _not_ my enemy, I don't know what he is at this point, don't ask. I never find him unless he wants to be found, I guess that's the fucking clown powers. I was just mad and wanted to leave the room."

"Y9u're n9t still mad?"

Kankri looked up at him with raised eyebrows. He looked completely ridiculous scribbling in the air with his finger like that. "You are so terrible at blackflirting."

Kankri flushed. "Y9ur 9wn meth9d c9nsists 9f waiting f9r me t9 d9 s9mething, then making fun 9f it."

"- See, that's not even something I was trying for, it's just my usual mode of discourse? How very enlightening to learn that it has that effect on you! I'll keep that in mind."

Karkat's role in the universe was such that he was commonly on the receiving end of humiliation, so it satisfied a deep personal hunger to be able to make another troll blush this hard.

Lalonde said from a short distance below them, "Karkat and Kankri? I am about to interrupt you."

Fucking seers. Kankri didn't look surprised, just a little sulkier. He laid one hand possessively atop Karkat's. Lalonde floated up and landed in front of them, her hair disheveled and one slipper still in her hand. She sat down and began working it on.

"Excuse me, I just woke up. Karkat, would you mind closing your eyes or looking away for a moment? I have a few questions for him."

"I'm fine, Lalonde, thanks for asking, thanks for rescuing me from horrific torture, I appreciated that. What do you want?" Kankri jabbed his hand with a fingernail. "What?!"

Lalonde said sourly, "It's none of your business, he wants to get it over with quickly, and my head hurts so so do I. Close your eyes."

"Fuck both of you," he said, then "Jegus what the _fuck,"_ because all he could see was fucking blood.

"Oh, that's interesting," she said, sounding more awake. "How large an area can you cover that way? - well, later, then. Karkat, it's just a little blood, stop thrashing around."

"Fuck both of you!" Kankri jabbed him again and laid one ankle over his. He was shivering again, which for whatever reason decided Karkat on shutting up. "Fine." He shut his eyes so he couldn't see the red.

Karkat hated being quiet and hated not being able to see what was going on. It was like being alone, and he kept thinking about shit he didn't want to. He didn't know what the hell his face was doing. He hoped it was holding the fuck still.

Very soon he would start getting upset about the idea of being fused to his asshole ancestor for days, but right now? He was glad he didn't have to be really alone yet. Because he was just going to start thinking about what had been done to him.

He never wanted to think about it again. He wanted to erase it. He wanted it never to have happened.

It would be easier if he could fall asleep the normal way, with normal dreams. Sometimes things got less real, after you'd done that, or they seemed a little further away or whatever. But he never seemed to get that kind of sleep anymore. He wondered if any of them did. He wondered if that changed the way you thought about things.

Maybe none of them thought and remembered the same way that they had, before. Maybe they weren't quite trolls and humans; they were something else, made just for the fucking game.

Well, hadn't they been? Hadn't he been the one to do it?

_Did the game make me do this just so it could beat us down over and over and over into eternity? Is that what we're here for?_

Kankri's hand closed tight on his. Lalonde said, "I thought I should tell you." Karkat opened his eyes again, and this time they were clear. Kankri had on his very sulkiest face, the one that happened when girls told him things, but he was holding onto Karkat with the desperation of the drowning.

Karkat said, "What?"

Lalonde did her mysterious shruggy thing, which didn't work very well because she was wincing because she had a headache. "I'm going to eat something, then try to go back to sleep and look for Ms. Megido again. Anything you'd like to say to her?"

"That as her leader I expect her to rescue me from tortureclowns in a prompt and efficient manner! Also, that she's kind of creepy sometimes. - I don't know, he's the Seer here, what did he say?!"

"Ask him yourself." She drifted off into the void. Fuck people who can fly.

Karkat said, "So? What was that?"

Kankri shook his head stubbornly, inching a little closer. "She suggested I d9 s9mething later. I d9n't want t9 talk a69ut it. Why d9n't y9u sh9w me ar9und y9ur d99med mete9r?"

"Your Seer powers don't show you useless minutia? Wow, I just assumed that's what they'd do! Useless minutia's what you're all about, right?"

That got a perfunctory scowl. "My visi9ns have never sh9wn this place t9 me, given that I can't 6leed 9ut 9n its fl99rs. 9r, n9t c9nstructively, anyway. A place n9t c9vered in my 6l99d is a n9velty t9 me, after s9 l9ng."

He couldn't maintain eye contact, and his fingers were still entwined firmly in Karkat's. Certain criminally-neglected portions of Karkat's anatomy were demanding that Kankri's tour of the World of the Living start in the spot he'd claimed as his own pseudo-respiteblock. Karkat considered their request.

_\- You know what, fuck both of our cowardice-drippy thinkpans, this is happening! I'm going to make a clear and unambigous move on my evil twin **right now.** Because otherwise, we're going to keep putting it off thinking we've got time, and then the moment I finally get him out of his clothes he's going to get zapped back._

Karkat _knew_ how romcoms worked and damnit this wasn't _funny_ in real life, not when the asshole was trying to commit extra-super-suicide or something and they might never see each other again even if he fucked that up.

And fuck Kankri's bullshit "celibacy," he'd been alone without a bucket for eons. Even with all the weird dream-bubble ghost-time shit he had going on, that had to be at _least_ as bad as seven sweeps of virginity. Also, he'd left what felt like a permanent imprint in Karkat's lower lip, which was a pretty clear indicator of intent. They both wanted to do this, they needed to get _on_ with it while there was _time._

He looked at Kankri, who was looking back up at him with a carefully contrived expression of bored superiority. His eyes were still faintly red from tears, and he'd talked to Lalonde one-handed because he didn't want to let go of Karkat. _God, you're still so fucking scared, aren't you?_

A rotten bloated feeling of self-hatred teamed up with a vestige of Karkat's self-control to bulgeblock him. Karkat said, "Yeah, okay, let's tour despair." He hauled Kankri to his feet. "First we see Can Town."

"What is Can T9wn?"

"Your destiny. It's made of food and useless minutia."

"That's n9t much 9f an explanati9n, 6ut I'm willing t9 g9 al9ng with any plan that has f99d in it."

So he held Kankri's hand and led him to the tiny pretend town to meet the tiny pretend mayor. That he'd never done anything this wigglerish even as a wiggler was very helpful in cooling him down. Karkat had last week begrudgingly assumed responsibility for the Can Town Municipal Water System, an upside-down cardboard box with bottles of water under it, and people who did that did not lose their virginity.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gamzee, unsurprisingly, did _not_ make a fucking appearance. Karkat couldn't imagine what he could say to him. He had abandoned him and drawn a funny goddamn picture of him getting hurt. Karkat felt like he was just going to fall the fuck apart from rage and betrayal. Like, he was so mad at Gamzee he literally felt that his limbs might start falling the fuck off, should Gamzee appear physically before him. Gamzee's bullshit purple codpiece shows itself, Karkat's head pops off and rolls down some stairs. This image was the perfect expression of about half of his emotional state.
> 
> The other half was a little more adult-rated. Kankri kept digging his fingers into him really hard; there were nubby little nail marks all up and down his left arm now. Karkat wasn't even sure he knew he was doing it, and if so he was _probably_ just making sure he wasn't alone, and if it actually _was_ a blackrom thing then it was probably really for an evil clown who wasn't there, not for him.
> 
> But just. Goddamn that little shit.

Staying awake wasn't hard for the first fifty hours or so. They watched movies and drank coffee, and Kankri ate things. The others took turns keeping them company, or acting as chaperones or whatever the fuck they thought they were doing.

Karkat kind of wanted to tell them, _Oh my god, do you people not realize that we are the guys who are going to be virgins forever?_ (Clown rape definitely didn't count. Kankri should be allowed to keep clinging to his chastity like the pathetic self-worth talisman it was.) Everyone conspicuously ignored the fact that they never let go of each other. Dave even limited himself to three comments on their trips to the load gaper, which were already fucking awkward and awful enough without his input.

Karkat often caught Kankri looking at their hands, or whatever part of them was touching. Karkat had the ugly but unshakeable idea that he was checking to make sure Karkat was still there, that he couldn't feel his hand. Somehow he was already slipping away.

Gamzee, unsurprisingly, did _not_ make a fucking appearance. Karkat couldn't imagine what he could say to him. He had abandoned him and drawn a funny goddamn picture of him getting hurt. Karkat felt like he was just going to fall the fuck apart from rage and betrayal. Like, he was so mad at Gamzee he literally felt that his limbs might start falling the fuck off, should Gamzee appear physically before him. Gamzee's bullshit purple codpiece shows itself, Karkat's head pops off and rolls down some stairs. This image was the perfect expression of about half of his emotional state.

The other half was a little more adult-rated. Kankri kept digging his fingers into him really hard; there were nubby little nail marks all up and down his left arm now. Karkat wasn't even sure he knew he was doing it, and if so he was _probably_ just making sure he wasn't alone, and if it actually _was_ a blackrom thing then it was probably really for an evil clown who wasn't there, not for him.

But just. Goddamn that little shit.

Aware of the possibility of the mutants exploding all over each other due to some unwholesome combination of lust and clownrage, the others gathered up a shitload of human movies to distract them. Dave assisted in explaining the human customs that made _Twilight_ an allegory for the "rapocalypse," most of which he was probably making up, until Kanaya hit him really hard over something he said about Alice. Kankri, of course, complained smugly about everything in _Vampire Effect,_ which had heretofore been the only movie upon which everyone on the meteor could agree. Feelings were hurt and grease-imbued high-starch nutrition nodules were thrown. This in turn _genuinely_ upset Kankri because _you did not waste food._

He ate too much. Karkat had to take him away to throw up twice. Each time, Karkat had meticulously detailed visions of punching himself in the face until he died while holding Kankri's hood out of the way, and the second time they both had to take a panic-attack break behind some fucking chests while Kanaya and Rose went quiet behind them.

How the hell was he supposed to live with this, wasn't there anything he could do. He held on so tight the ghost's horn left a dent in his cheek.

"Oh fuck," he breathed. "I am in _so much fucking trouble."_

Confused and shaken, Kankri had given his cheek a chaste, infuriating little kiss. The scared look on his ugly face made Karkat nauseous. _You don't know what the hell you're doing, do you?_ He had never wanted anybody as badly as he wanted his scared raped little ancestor, and he hated himself so fucking hard for it.

The last movie was _Madadayo!,_ by the end of which Kanaya, their last remaining stalwart chaperone, had finally abandoned them to do shit that probably wasn't quite as doomed and erotically incoherent. Karkat was pretty sure Lalonde put out.

The movie made both of them mad. They went for a walk, and after twenty minutes, while surrounded by creepy preserved chess guys in science jars, got in a stupid fight about exactly _why_ it upset them.

Was it because they were, demonstrably in one case, doomed to die young, uselessly, and without a single satisfactorily-filled quadrant? Because none of _their_ friends respected the immensity of the horrific shit they'd gone through? Or because the movie, by never showing what the old human guy had done to make himself so beloved, made it impossible for them to morbidly judge themselves in comparison to him?

"Y9u're wr9ng, as I think must always 6e the case when talking a69ut m9vies, 6ecause we're n9t supp9sed t9 6e c9mparing him t9 9urselves, that's n9t the actual p9int -"

"It's always the point! He's the one the movie's focusing on, and there's no hook character or anything, so you're supposed to be empathizing with him! And I mean - why does he even get sympathy points for freaking out at the wrong time about the wrong thing, you know?"

"That's what pe9ple d9, it's called displacement, y9u illiterate idi9t!"

"Fuck you, look, he pretended not to be upset about losing his hive, then once he had a new hive, and everything was okay, he lost his meowbeast, and _then_ he had a meltdown -"

"Y9u're just re-stating y9ur earlier remarks, rew9rded 9nly slightly, as if I'm incapa6le 9f -"

"- shut up, and he took it out on his poor _matesprit_ and she had to use the public ablution trap house and - I don't know! He gets all this sympathy for being repressed and pathetic and not telling anyone when he's unhappy, and it's infuriating! He didn't even _build_ that hive!"

Kankri, whose wrist he was holding too tight because he was throwing a tantrum, stopped trying to pry him off for long enough to write angrily in blood, _"Why did we watch that m9vie?"_

"It was Terezi's idea, she thought there were swordfights. She left when she realized she'd fucked up."

"N9. She left 6ecause y9u were crying a69ut the cat. It was em6arassing f9r every9ne." He was trying to squirm away again, but he would never let that get in the way of telling someone off, so he was doing it ineffectively one-handed.

"Fuck you, I did _not_ \- this is stupid," he interrupted himself, and yanked Kankri into an angry kiss.

Kankri used his powers for good for once and knocked him down to the floor. Thank _fuck -_

_\- Goddamn you, Kankri, don't you **dare** start cuddling me in a platonic fashion! I have other plans for you! Don't do it!_

Kankri snuggled up against him like a sexually-immature meowbeast, and it felt so goddamn _nice_ and he was such a _coward._ Karkat stroked his cheek. Kankri sighed contentedly, limp and deflated and frighteningly trusting against Karkat's chest. It seemed strange, when he made little noises like that, that he couldn't talk. Karkat actually missed his awful bitchy voice. There was shit he wanted to hear him say.

Karkat muttered dispiritedly, "I don't know why I'm being so goddamn nice to you when you can't keep your fucking pointy bits to yourself."

Kankri raised his head, frowning as if he was thinking about that idiotic manipulative sentiment seriously. He kissed Karkat's jawline below the ear, gently, without teeth. Karkat went kind of liquid and inert inside.

Goddamnit, this wasn't what he _wanted._

"Okay. Okay, listen, get off me." Kankri rolled off, but they stayed on the floor, kind of facing each other awkwardly on their sides. Kankri's face was so hard to fucking read sometimes, it shouldn't be so hard, damnit, it was _his_ face and _he_ couldn't ever keep a fucking secret.

Karkat said, "Okay. Okay, I uh, I want to say something." Kankri widened his empty eyes in insincere astonishment. "Just shut the fuck up, it's a thing that actually fucking matters for once. So Gamzee used to be my moirail."

Kankri looked appropriately horrified. "I said shut up! And I was the best goddamn moirail ever, okay? While it lasted I was fucking _great,_ I kept his homicidal clownshit together like it was inside the homicidal clown event horizon! - Or, maybe I did that, I don't know, but he didn't kill anybody else and that's what counts, right?"

"But he was a pretty shitty moirail, I guess. I mean, he didn't really help me out. Just - like this, you know?" Kankri nodded, because of course _he_ knew what it was like to need a hug. "And I couldn't really get that anywhere else, either - I mean Dave's really fucking weird about it, I don't know, it's a human thing I think? Or a human male thing, or... anyway, what I'm saying is, this is good."

"But also I need to get laid. _Really bad._ So can we just _please_ do that."

Kankri glared at him and kicked him in the shins. "- is that a no." Glare. "Goddamnit! Would it have helped if I'd put that kind of - less bluntly? Or bribed you with food, or something." Kick. "Fuck you!"

In any other conceivable situation, they would not have just kept holding hands on the fucking floor. Kankri wrote sulkily, "That was the m9st 9ffensively p99rly-th9ught-9ut and -w9rded pr9p9siti9n in the hist9ry 9f 69th 9f 9ur universes. I kn9w this f9r a fact, 6ecause 9f my fucking seer p9wers."

"Your seer powers don't do shit. - Yeah, like normally one or both of us would kinda run off and throw a hissyfit, but that's kind of off the table, due to clown problems. I'm trying to think of a romcom where -"

"Y9u sh9uld 6e _ap9l9gizing_ right n9w, you awful insensitive pers9n!"

"No! Look, we've been all over each other for days and you could disappear any second and I can't leave you alone long enough to deal with certain things manually and I'm going to _explode!_ I'm going to die a virgin! Because I exploded, due an excess of unrelieved virginity."

"Are y9u already trying t9 6reak y9ur 9wn newly-set rec9rd? Is that what this is?!"

This seduction really was going impressively badly. Karkat muttered, "I hope my guts get all over you. When I explode."

"If it were p9ssi6le t9 sp9ntane9usly c9m6ust 9f sexual frustration, I pr9mise y9u I'd _kn9w!_ Just leave me al9ne, my c9ld dead 69dy has 6een mishandled en9ugh recently!"

"Well, so has mine, except it's alive still I guess! And also you keep fucking kissing me, and that's confusing!"

"Well, may6e I'm c9nfused, t99!" He did it again, with teeth; Karkat tasted their blood, and bit back, hard and angry. Kankri pulled away frustratedly, wiping his bloody lowr lip childishly with his sleeve. "I d9n't even kn9w what I'm supp9sed t9 6e _d9ing!"_

"Oh, yes you do! You _definitely_ know! And even if you don't, I just _told_ you!"

"He'll kill y9u!"

"What -" Karkat was so worked up he didn't quite process that. "Don't even start making excuses for your celibacy shit -"

Kankri glared at him unimpressively, his eyes dripping pink. "I'M N9T CELI6ATE. That's s9mething the mes wh9 g9t t9 live l9nger started d9ing f9r stupid reas9ns! He said he'd find y9u and kill y9u f9r real, 6ecause he d9esn't want me t9 6e with any9ne 6ut him 6ecause I d9n't deserve that and y9u're making this" Here his monologue was interrupted by some unintelligible flailing. "y9u're making this s9 hard. I can't let y9u die, 6ut I _wish_ I c9uld. I d9n't want t9 g9 6ack 6y myself."

He dug himself into Karkat's side like a clinging-marine-creature. Karkat didn't know what to say. He kissed him again. It felt different every time.

Kankri wrote bitterly, "Y9u're n9t 6eing fair t9 me. Y9u're as 6ad as he is."

"Don't stick me in the same ovoid placental module carton with your evil clown!"

Kankri glared up at him resentfully. "Neither 9f y9u let me c9ntr9l my 9wn 69dy."

"I - okay, asshole, _how_ am I "controlling your body?" Because that's not actually within my skill set, you know!" Kankri looked sharply away, licking his torn lip. "You little _shit,_ it's _not_ my fault you need a pail!"

"Y9u've put y9ur hands all _9ver_ me. Y9u _kn9w_ I'm n9t used t9 that."

"No, fuck that noise, I hug you because you get scared and cry _all the time._ What, am I supposed to ignore that?!"

"I wish y9u w9uld! I can't take"

He stopped, then wiped the sentence away in disgust, but Karkat didn't need to see the rest of it anyway. They were evil twins, after all.

He pulled Kankri up against him. Kankri moved slowly and resentfully, but he moved anyway. He felt so warm and alive and real. He was just Karkat's size and just Karkat's temperature, and he didn't have any of the unfamiliar sharp edges other trolls had, and Karkat knew just where he needed to be touched. He was perfectly, sickeningly vulnerable.

He shifted constantly in restless ways that were instantly understandable under Karkat's rough hands - his own hands were so soft, the spoiled little shit - and he was always stiff and suspicious and indignant and needing something, food or attention. Sometimes he fell still with the sudden despairing slackness of a mutant surrendering to his own culling. Karkat could pick Kankri apart and put him together again as easily as he could his own worthless self.

Kankri could probably read Karkat's mind. Right now he was stony in his arms, fingers knotted into his shirt, soaked in sweat and looking up at Karkat with cold, transparently fake disdain. He was fucking infuriating. Karkat stroked his cheek, and Kankri shivered like he'd been drenched in icewater, then bit Karkat's hand.

Karkat said hoarsely, "Take your stupid clothes off you stupid idiot who's stupid."

Kankri's bulge, up against Karkat's left knee, reacted to this eloquent remark in exactly the way you'd expect of a guy who'd needed somebody to fuck him since before the birth of the universe.

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

"Just, _please?"_ Karkat said helplessly. "What would it even actually _take?_ I mean, however you want this, we'll do it."

Kankri freed a hand reluctantly. He touched Karkat's face with it, just below his right eye. Karkat shuddered.

Then he wrote, "N9."

He looked even more disgusted with himself than Karkat did, watching himself write that. He wrote hurriedly, "I d9 h9wever give y9u 6lanket permissi9n t9 h9ld me like this whenever y9u feel the need 6ecause it's been a _l9ng_ time and I've really really really missed 9hhh damnit Karkat 9W -"

How did he even have time to write a bunch of h's after that 9? How did Karkat even have time to read them!? This had to be part of the reason they were so fucking bad at this.

Kankri tucked his head under Karkat's chin when they came up for air, sweaty and dazed as if they'd actually committed the treasonous act of mutant-on-mutant procreation. Maybe for him a kiss was all it took? What even was he, a Troll Laura Kinsale character? "Goddamnit, Kankri..." Small flinch, hurt glare. "What - what did I say now, jegus!"

"That's 9nly the sec9nd time y9u've ever said my name t9 me."

"So?"

"So I d9n't get t9 fucking hear it 9ften!"

"Fuck you Kankri, fuck you Kankri, fuck you Kankri -" Kankri shuddered so hard Karkat had to look down to make sure he wasn't having biological processes. "...wow, does that really work? Is it like, your password or something? Huh. Kankri, take your goddamn _clothes_ off!"

"Fuck y9u!" he wrote sloppily. "Can't y9u f9rm a m9re - em9ti9nally-supp9rtive sentence than that?!"

"I do not _support_ your decision to keep your stupid god-tier leggings on, I want them _off_ and I want your -"

"Shut the fuck up a69ut that, just _st9p,_ it's 6een millennia since any9ne's said my name t9 me, and l9nger since any9ne's had a kind w9rd f9r me, and I need s9mething like that 9r - 9r I d9n't kn9w what I'll d9, s9mething even sadder and stupider than all the rest 9f this shit, pr96ably. Karkat, _please?"_

The stuff he wrote got kind of paler and harder-to-read when he got agitated, maybe it was getting diluted? Karkat scrubbed it away with his sleeve because there was too much of it in their air, then dabbed Kankri's pink-streaked face. "Kankri, just... fuck." He thought about it. Kankri scowled at him. Karkat said, "Fuck you!"

"W9w. G99d try, I guess?"

"We're both complete assholes, this is hard! Can I just - say your name over and over while kissing you badly, will that work?" Karkat was pretty sure he was capable of desperately mumbling Kankri's name, in between sloppy kisses and while thinking miserably of bulges and nooks.

"...It's n9t ideal fr9m my p9int 9f view, starved as I am f9r 9rdinary praise and affecti9n, 9r indeed any f9rm 9f p9sitive attenti9n, 6ut if it's all y9u've g9t, I guess I'm 6uying. I 9f c9urse 9we y9u whatever physical satisfacti9n my 69dy can 9ffer, sh9rt 9f -"

"You can't get passive-aggressive at me while I'm trying to figure out how to be nice to you!" said Karkat, stung. "Kankri, you are so important to me it makes me kind of nauseous and confused, and I want you to stay here on this gross meteor with me, and just - not have to be hurt by clowns, or be hungry or afraid or lonely anymore. And. I'm really grateful that you - looked out for me - what do you even call what you did, took a quickly-flying metallic projectile for me, the projectile being Makara's gross genitals? That was, just, fucking better and braver than I deserved, and you didn't have to fucking do it, and I wish to fuck there was something I could do for you besides try _really_ fucking hard not to cuss at you. Kankri. - gogdamn it literally _anyone_ else would be better at this than me, this is bullshit you've only got me!"

Kankri sighed. Karkat glared at him suspiciously. "What, okay or not?"

"9kay. Thank y9u." He didn't look happy, he never looked happy, he just looked a little - looser, maybe? He folded himself sleepily up against Karkat again and yawned.

"Hey, no, drink some fucking coffee, we can't go to sleep, you can't _leave!"_

Kankri looked at the coffee wearily. Neither of them really liked the shit - it looked like blood and even tasted a little like it, Karkat thought, like how did humans even drink the shit? But he pulled away and poured a cup. Karkat had lost track of the number of times they'd refilled Kanaya's thermos.

"- what's the longest you've stayed awake, by the way?"

"I d9n't think I slept during 9ur session. I didn't want t9 dream 9f the v9id, since I knew I'd 6e spending eternity here pretty s99n anyway. 6ut that was of c9urse essentially f9rever ag9. I sleep a l9t n9w. 6eing awake gets t99 hard s9metimes."

He yawned again, then cringed. He and Karkat hurriedly collaborated on getting another two cups of coffee into him, and then he ate an unecessary orange creamsicle while leaning against Karkat, to reassure himself of the availability of food and mutants. He wrote uncertainly, "They w9uld tell y9u if they saw anything useful, w9uldn't they?"

"Who?"

"The seers."

"If they figure out a way to help you, they're damn well going to fucking tell me, gog. And why the fuck aren't you a seer all of a sudden."

"It's 9nly, I d9n't think that I ever see things that are _useful_ anym9re," he wrote. "N9t even things that are useful t9 the dead. I see meaningless 6leeding things which reflect my life, which is 9ver... I w9nder if it was the same f9r him, if that's why it went s9 6adly."

"I don't know what you're fucking talking about," said Karkat.

"Y9ur w9rld's hist9ry was pretty interesting, y9u kn9w. (Als9 upsettingly relevant, in a strictly pers9nal sense.) Y9u c9uld have st99d t9 have studied it."

"What, like - wars and shit? Are you talking about FLARPing or something?"

Kankri looked annoyed. "The duplicate 9f me wh9 lived 9n y9ur w9rld suffered a fate sharing certain superficial c9ngruences with my current situati9n," he wrote. "Did y9u n9t even kn9w _that?"_

"- ancestors are bullshit to make highbloods feel better about themselves! That's been my intellectual position all my life, and I choose to stick to it for the present moment in defense of my decision not to care about that stuff!"

"I'm real! And I really hate y9u. Very well, I'll explain it -"

"No, don't tell me a fucking story, I don't want to hear a story! I know about the dead yelling guy, it's just - he's not you, it's not the same! Like, for one thing, the fuck if you could lead a revolution, asshole."

"Neither c9uld he! He just g9t his friends killed 6eing self-a6s9rbed and clueless, and then his Kurl9z had him t9rtured until he was dead. My 9wn has indicated t9 me that he is aware 9f this hist9ry, and finds it aesthetically pleasing and w9rthy 9f emulati9n."

"Oh. Uh. - jegus, why would you assholes want to go around imitating shit your alt-versions did when their lives were so fucked up and awful!? You really are talking about FLARPing! You guys are FLARPing!"

"I'm n9t FLARPing! FLARPing is in general a childish practice and als9 _gr9ss,_ 6ut I _especially_ d9 n9t want -"

"Like fuck you don't, this is a blackcrush if I ever -"

"D9es the c9ncept 9f c9nsent mean _n9thing_ t9 y9u!? I d9n't want him t9 t9uch me! 9r y9u! I d9n't want that!" Crying into a fucking coffee cup while trying to drink out of it was one of the most undignified fucking things you could do in your magic god pajamas, so of course Kankri did that, and when Karkat tried to hug him they got coffee all over themselves and made it worse. Fuck, they both needed a shower.

"Okay, fuck, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have - I know you didn't, okay, just stop, just fucking stop! I know it's not your fault, okay?!"

"It _is_ my fault! I killed her!"

"No, okay, you know what, fuck that! You're all three dead now and you have been for a long time, have you even _talked_ to her since then!? Either of you? Have you _tried?"_

"I have n9 right t9 speak t9"

"You are the biggest coward either of our universes has ever encountered, and I don't need seer powers for that because I'm the only other reasonable alternative and it's not me! Find her and say "I am s9rry I g9t y9u fucking killed (trigger warning f9r getting y9u fucking killed)" or whatever you want to say! This shit is not her responsibility, it's unfair to keep hanging it on her like this!"

"I'm n9t g9ing t9 69ther her, it d9esn't have anything t9 d9 with her."

Karkat glared at him until he began, of his own accord, to look ashamed by the revealing nature of that remark. Karkat said, "Okay, when we fall asleep? We're going to visit Kanaya's ancestor, and she's going to explain to you _all about_ the Women In Thermal Husks trope. And then we're going to _find_ your ghost catgirl, and you're going to _apologize_ for getting her killed as a necessary part of your character development arc, and _she's_ going to do whatever she wants about that - claw your eyes out, eat you, accept your apology and human-marry you, just however she wants to play it! _That's_ how this is going to go down."

"I d9n't want t9 see her again!"

"Do you want to see _me_ again?! About how long do you think we're going to be able to hold _out_ without doing something that'll make Carlos murder me, Seer of Miserable Stupid Woofcreatureshit?!"

Kankri looked pretty shattered. "What d9es that have t9 d9 with him? And what if she thinks what he's d9ing is _right?"_

"Kankri. Right now? Right now is _working-brain time._ You need to turn your rotted dead brain back _on,_ just - find the fucking switch, I bet it's somewhere near the one that's in charge of you crying! _Is the situation which you just described at all likely?"_

"...9kay, yeah, n9. Meulin pr96a6ly w9uldn't like that kind 9f m9vie. 6ut he d9esn't have t9 d9 what she says! Why - why d9 y9u think this s9 imp9rtant, aside fr9m a standp9int 9f pers9nal resp9nsi6ility and me 6eing w9rthless 9n all c9nceiva6le axes!?"

"Because - because of dream logic and shit, I don't know! You're the Seer of Blood, you ought to be able to _see_ him coming to make you fucking _bleed_ \- there's the blood part! - and get the hell away from him! But he keeps catching you and hurting you! And you ought to be angry at him for what he's done to you, but you keep coming back to talking about how you deserve to be hurt! And somehow it's all the same fucking thing! You're both having the same dream! - okay, what did Lalonde tell you, what did she even say? Did she say the _exact same thing_ I just said, but several days earlier and without freaking the fuck out?! She totally did, didn't she, ugh I fucking hate it when that happens."

He looked away painfully. "Ms. Pyr9pe, 9n the 9ther hand, c9nveyed the sentiment that I sh9uld kill him until he st9ps c9ming 6ack."

"- wait, when did she tell you _that?"_

"She texted me while y9u were crying 9ver the me9w6east."

Kankri showed him his phone:

JUST K1LL TH4T SH1TTY CLOWN 4LR34DY

DOUBL3-K1LL

WH4T3V3R!

Kankri's response:

He'd 9nly c9me 6ack!

TH3N DOUBL3-K1LL H1M 4G41N YOU STUP1D DUMB4SS J3GUS!

After a moment of reflection, she had added,

YOU H4V3 TO K1LL B4D CLOWNS 4ND TH4T 1S 4LL TH4T TH3R3 1S TO 1T

4ND 1'M NOT T4LK1NG TO YOU 4BOUT TH1S 4G41N, YOU'R3 JUST SO STUP1D!

If Karkat had not been so fucking tired he might have been able to figure out why these messages were making him want to basically die. Kankri had concluded the exchange with, "N9, y9u are!" so he was no help.

Karkat said, "Okay, apologize to Leijon, then you kill your clown _maybe,_ depending on my evaluation of Terezi's judgment when I'm less fucked-up over how stupid you are, we have an itinerary. Is this settled? Is it? I can yell you into submission if it's not settled -"

"Y9u d9n't need t9 yell I'll d9 it st9p yelling at me! I want t9 g9 6ack t9 y9u 6eing gentle with me s9me m9re, I'm s9 _tired!"_

"Okay, yeah, that's doable."

Nothing felt even a little right about this shit, but it wasn't like Karkat's best judgment had ever done him any favors. He kissed Kankri some more, and when they came up for breath, he said his name to him a few times. The way Kankri looked at him hurt so goddamn much.

Holding a soft warm badly-needed little asshole against him like they both deserved it, he thought sleepily of a mop closet and a hungry cold wiggler alone in it, a sacrifice to somebody else's justice; and he thought, stupid with exhaustion, that he must have fucked up. He'd taken that kid home and given him food and comfort and told him that somehow impossibly he was wanted, and the law that kept him there could be broken. And that couldn't be right; it couldn't be allowed; it wasn't what they'd been made for.

His arms were already empty. He fell asleep.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By Karkat's count, 99% percent of their interactions started with Dave making some dumb tactless remark that put his ignorance on display like a prize-winning dirt-apple, and Karkat throwing something.
> 
> This time he just straight-up asked, “So did you do the nasty with your evil twin.” But in the way he did where it sounded like there was no question mark at the end? Karkat threw his pen at him, then got upset because Dave’d made him throw his pen and he needed that pen.
> 
> Twenty minutes later, after the subject of why he needed a pen anyway, because he didn't even have any paper, like what was he doing with it, I just need some real basic background for this tantrum before we proceed man come on, had been thoroughly hashed out, Karkat answered the original question, which Dave had basically forgotten due to the execrably short nature of his attention span.
> 
> “…sorry, I guess? So uh. What are you going to do. About that.”

Karkat woke up.

He didn't throw a tantrum about falling the fuck asleep and losing his stupid ghost right away. That didn't happen until the second day that he couldn't fall asleep, when Dave said something stupid. That was pretty much how shit worked. It was like: Karkat wants to throw a tantrum but manfully refrains, Dave says something stupid, manful refraining from tantrum is rendered meaningless under the incalculable weight of human idiocy. By Karkat's count, 99% percent of their interactions started with Dave making some dumb tactless remark that put his ignorance on display like a prize-winning dirt-apple, and Karkat throwing something.

This time he just straight-up asked, "So did you do the nasty with your evil twin." But in the way he did where it sounded like there was no question mark at the end? Karkat threw his pen at him, then got upset because Dave’d made him throw his pen and he needed that pen.

Twenty minutes later, after the subject of why he needed a pen anyway, because he didn't even have any paper, like what was he doing with it, I just need some real basic background for this tantrum before we proceed man come on, had been thoroughly hashed out, Karkat answered the original question, which Dave had basically forgotten due to the execrably short nature of his attention span.

“…sorry, I guess? So uh. What are you going to do. About that."

"That's basically the worst question of all time. I really can't stand how you talk, have I mentioned that? What does that question even mean, what am I going to do about what?!"

"What are you going to do about your dead gay twin boyfriend - hey no don't throw your pen again. That pen's been through some kind of emotional roller coaster already today."

"I don't know what a roller coaster is. - I'm going to find my personal Kankri whose fate I have chosen to care about the next time I go to sleep, is what I'm going to do! And no, see, what I don't get is why you even brought this up, you know damn well you neither want to know nor expect to understand the problems at hand! Your grasp of relationships is pathetic even by human standards, and -"

"Fuck you, give me some credit here. You want to bang the dude because he looks like you and you're like, the spadesies equivalent of a narcissist."

"No, shut your filthy seedflap, it's more complicated than that! Maybe not by much, but by _some!_ And the some is the most important part!"

"Is the some the dress. It’s the dress and tights, right."

"I don’t know why you keep bringing up the fucking Seer dress and the fucking Seer tights, like why are you even so interested in that aspect of the situation! And just - don't give me relationship advice, you know you're bad at that, it's something which I've informed you several times that you just should never do!"

"Bullshit. My advice is the best. Remember how I told you how to get with John, remember that."

"There is _no such garment_ as a "wife-beater!" I asked Lalonde. She said it meant "person who hurts their concupiscent partner in unwanted and potentially fatal ways," and that’s not a name for a garment and definitely not one to which a caliginously-oblivious fuckbrigade like Egbert would be attracted anyway, and regardless that is a topic you didn't need to bring up right now because I'm obviously freaking the fuck out about it!"

"Uh."

Dave was hanging upside-down on a pointless beam in the music room ceiling, which was a thing he did because he _knew_ it pissed Karkat off. He jumped down and landed in front of the couch, upon which Karkat was twisted into some impossible goddamn position he'd gotten himself into due to being mad.

"You know what, just fuck this whole stupid conversation, how it's gone so far. I think we need to take down the clown. That’s my fucking assessment of your ecto-something’s situation right now, do I have this figured the fuck out."

"No! It's none of your business, why do you care?!" That was a stupid and embarrassing thing to have said, so he kept talking. That was how you dealt with it when you said stupid stuff: you kept talking. "Ask him, I don't know, I just - I can't decide this, it's fucked up! It's like -"

"No, shut the fuck up for a second. Here's what's going down as I understand it. There is an evil clown. The evil clown is beating your -"

"Don't say it," said Karkat. He untwisted himself so as to lie face-down on the couch. "Do. _Not._ Say it."

"Fine I'm not saying it, and the evil clown has also done shit to you and fucked your head up even more than it normally is, which is really obvious for a lot of reasons even though you’re not actually talking about that. So the clown is going down. That is how logic works, you need to fucking learn it."

"That is how the logic that exists inside your soft alien pan works, yes. I understand your disability and sincerely fucking regret the problems which it causes you each night that you fail to remember to put on different pants."

"Thanks man," said Dave. He sat down in front of Karkat on the floor, so Karkat could only see the back of his head when he looked up. Dave did not have serious conversations face-to-face with people. He had to be texting or turned around or some shit. Karkat reached over and yanked out his earbuds. "But yeah, I think I'm a kill the clown."

"No! - not without his permission! By which I mean Kankri's permission, obviously! Also, maybe you shouldn’t do that because the clown might somehow double-kill you, and you are _probably_ necessary to the continuation of reality for some stupid reason!"

"Fucking clown's not going to kill me, our whole session was just fucking clowns," said Dave, offended. "It was all like, clown cat princess bird dogs with swords in them, which are basically still just clowns. Did those kill me?"

"Yes."

"Shut up. So have you talked to like. Rose or Terezi about shit."

"Fuck you."

"I really think maybe you should do that, man. Because Seer powers and tights."

"If they wanted some input into our deaths, they should've gotten to us before - that - that -" He fucking hated it when Dave did that fucking thing where he looked quickly around for like a lusus or something, because Karkat was having emotions in his face. "- before that _shit_ happened, and I just don't want to _talk_ about this anymore, okay?!"

On the stairs behind them, Rose said, "Could it be that you're expecting the worst? That definitely surprises me. I am surprised."

" _Goddamn it do not float around so I can't hear you!_ Fucking _either_ of you!"

Rose said, "I'm not. - Karkat expects the worst, what an uncharacteristic turn of events -"

"Am I _ever_ fucking wrong?" he asked her, sitting up and glaring over the back of the couch at her. She was heavily leaning over the banister, the black circles under her eyes giving her a misleadingly trollish look. She was like that a lot recently. He’d started wishing she’d wear fucking shades like Dave, so his pan wouldn’t trick himself into thinking she knew what she was fucking talking about.

She said, "Yes. There are several paths which he could take to achieve a personally-positive outcome. Terezi suggested one to him, I'm given to understand, and I suggested another. - they may be mutually-exclusive."

"Yeah. I mean, we fucking talked about that, and I guess I’m kind of on your side here? (Dave’s on Terezi’s, surprise surprise.) But the thing is - I mean, I've been fucking thinking about this. It's better for _him_ if he fucking apologizes to her, that's something he needs to do for himself. But Nepeta’s dancestor doesn't have any goddamn obligation to talk to him! To ever have to _look_ at him again, if she doesn’t want to! And you know, in normal circumstances, I don’t even know if he’d deserve it."

“He’s just so fucking self-absorbed, it’s like he's made her death into this big mythological event in his head that justifies his fucked-up existence. He's warped it into something that's all about him. You know, just talking to him, I got no sense of what she’s even like? All he ever said about her was that she died! What if she just… doesn't want to deal with this kind of shit from a guy she probably either can’t stand, or stopped giving a shit about a long time ago? 'cause if I were a dead catgirl, I wouldn't!"

"And the way she is in his head, that can't be the way she really is. He doesn't talk about her like a fucking person, she's just something he did wrong. How's he even going to _find_ her again? The place he lives is all made out of fucking memories, and he's forgotten her. If he ever even fucking knew her."

Dave said, "Wow man deep." He said that without commas.

"These are legitimate concerns," said Rose. "Others of his friends have inadvertently sealed themselves away through similarly narcissistic attitudes - though Meenah seems fine now, I guess? But anyway, he's got two ways around that, and they're both really the same way."

"As you said, Meulin is, to Kankri, a sort of black hole of thought, around which light is distorted. He cannot see her clearly, and has not for many eons. But that's not true of everyone he knew. What is necessary is for him to solicit the help of a guide - a friend of his who was particularly clear-sighted."

Karkat said, "You sent him to Kanaya's ancestor! That is what you fucking did. That was your whole fucking plan. Just fucking say that, jegus!"

Rose said, "I sent him to Kanaya's ancestor, Karkat. That is what I fucking did. That was my whole fucking plan."

"You can't solve all your fucking problems leaning on fucking Maryams like that!"

"Like what, precisely?"

Dave interrupted, "Oh my god can we not have another stupid catfight like with the pen. Oh hey, it is literally a catfight due to the catgirl. - what's the other way, you said there were two ways."

Rose said, "If he wants to find his way out of this, he's got to stop being such a shitty Seer."

Karkat said, "Well. Yeah. Fuck."

-

Karkat fell asleep.

He dreamed of the Battlefield. He was lying bruised on the ground, and when he looked up at Skaia, all the clouds he saw were red.

Dave said, "Hey, this is John's dad's car, where'd that come from. - Karkat how did the car run you over all by itself."

"Why the fuck are you here?!" Karkat climbed to his feet and regarded the stupid four-wheeled device behind him. His arm was shaky and painful where Kurloz had hurt him, but no longer broken - he'd forgotten what that felt like, while he'd been awake. "- Hi, Kanaya."

Kanaya was wearing a fancy dress he'd seen Jade in, all covered in stars, hiked up above her knees as she knelt to examine the plants in a burned garden. Dave was in his fucking cape and fucking hovering, like fucking always.

Dave said, "I dunno, maybe we're asleep, jegus. Oh, hey, let's go for a ride. I'm basically sixteen, which means I can basically drive."

Kanaya said doubtfully, "Does it in fact work that way? And Karkat, are you okay?"

"- yeah, fine." Karkat kicked the thing's tire, reassuring himself it wasn't _actually_ made from shriveled-black grubs. "This goes faster than walking, right?"

"No. We invented them to ride slowly around in while blasting the bass."

Okay, that wasn't going to help, then. "Your species' inferiority continues to astonish me, and I'm going to go find Kankri. You do what you want with the four-wheel -"

Kanaya said firmly, "He is lying, Karkat. I saw John using one. Like any motorized vehicle, they move more quickly than mere bipedal locomotion may allow. This one also flies."

"It does?" Karkat looked to Dave suspiciously for confirmation. Dave said, "Dude your species' inferiority continues to astonish me. Of course human cars fucking fly and it wasn't John just doing the windy thing, come on."

Kanaya took the front passenger seat, and Dave piloted them in the direction of Skaia. Kanaya said thoughtfully, "I suppose that the images in the clouds need not be true, in a dream..."

Karkat had been watching the ground below for stuff that looked like Prospit or Kankri's library, but he glanced back up at Skaia then: "What the everloving fuck!?" A slice of LOPAH passed overhead in a cloud, hazy with smoke, and the rivers all dyed olive-green. "That's where I'm fucking going, I guess! That stupid self-aggrandizing piece of shit! - I don't know how I'm supposed to _get_ there -"

Kanaya said, "Dave, steer us into the cloud."

"Which cloud?"

"The one with all the green blood, you obtuse shitbrigade!"

"Are you guys seeing a cloud raining blood or something, because I guess I don’t share that particular set of neur -"

Kanaya interrupted impatiently, "Left and upwards a little bit, please. The cloud that is shaped a bit like a cupgrubcake and a bit like a hoofbeast."

"Uh -" Kanaya leaned over him and took possession of the wheel. "- hey no, that is a for-serious driving no-no, Kanaya!"

"Oh my god you assholes, watch where you're going!" They plowed through a flock of fairy bulls into LOPAH's sky. "Goddamnit, you killed Tavros's worthless lusus _again!"_

They shuddered to a landing next to the fucking library. The door Kurloz had broken was still broken. There were splinters of bone scattered on the ground, and shards of the useless doorstop-boulder Kankri had dropped in front of it. Kanaya peeked through the hole in the wall, then looked back at him questioningly. Dave was watching him, too. Time to fall the fuck apart! "I don't want to fucking go in what if he's _there!_ \- not Kankri the fucking _clown_ fuck both of you just fuck you!"

Kanaya demonstrated her chainsaw's continued existence. "I am going inside. You may wait out here with Dave to keep you safe if you do not want to -"

"Fuck you!" They went inside.

The blood in here was Kankri's blood, not the world's blood - still bright ugly red. Blood just never fucking dried in this dream. The trail Karkat had followed to where he'd been left, last time, was still there. He felt like his bloodpusher was trying to get bigger and bust his ribcage open like in a Twelfth Perigee’s Eve story or some shit. "Fuck this - no!" Kanaya had gotten sick of waiting for his useless ass and was following the trail herself. "That's where he was - fucking _waiting,_ you can't just -"

Dave said uncomfortably, "Look, we can take down the clown, we had that whole talk about taking down the fucking clown -"

"No! No, I don't want to - fucking _do_ this anymore, fuck this place, fuck him and his fucked-up problems and his fucked-up clown, I'm going back outside!" Dave followed him, Kanaya didn't. He said, "Kanaya! You can’t go _over_ there!"

She looked back at him, and he could not describe her expression, except that it made him really mad and ashamed. Then she did her drinker-fastness thing and blurred out. _“No don’t you fucking dare die -”_

Then she was back beside him. She laid a hand on his shaking shoulder gently. "It’s okay. Everything is okay. There is no one here but the three of us. Are you very sure that you do not want to -"

"We're getting out of here! We're getting out of here _right now!"_ He couldn't deal with the smell of blood for one more second.

Dave said, "Yeah, okay, I am going to ask Rose if she knows how to alchemize some goddamn Xanax for you -"

"I don't know what that is but you cannot solve this particular problem with alchemy so _fuck off!"_

"No, you have completely got PTSD about the grody library - huh."

The ground was sugar.

Someone had very recently made a pretty good sculpture of a butler nursing its young from it; two sets of footprints led away from it in the direction of a mountain which was in fact a very large, lopsided cake. It was iced with what appeared to be a "game over" screen saying "BETTA LUCK NEXT TIME." More-distant cakes were shaped like falling meteors, with fragile-looking trails of fire and debris built up above them from icing and marshmallows.

Dave said, “Is it like a blood player thing that you hate tea?"

"What the fuck?"

"Well, I mean, you guys are sort of thematically fucking up the landscape with your problems, right? Like, that's what happened with the green blood? And all the LOLCAT tea's gone."

"No, the "what the fuck" was because, why do you know about Nepeta's world even!?"

"I dunno, because I've fucking talked to her a few times, jeez. Why are you even freaking out about that specific thing."

"I'm not!"

He was right, though; the landscape here was all sugar and big, garish cakes - nothing tea-looking. "I don't know, maybe he had a traumatic experience with tea that he's repressing, or -"

Kanaya said, "Actually, Karkat, I have been here before, and this appears to be a faithful representation of Meulin's world. It's too bad the car is gone - we could have avoided the traps more easily while airborne."

"Traps?"

"The Land of Ludicrous Cakes and Traps. I guess that there are only so many ways to make an acronym which spells "LOLCAT," which for some reason appears to have been a priority... Anyway, perhaps this means we are on the right track?"

"His Meulin never even got to see her Land. She wouldn't know to dream of it. Just, fucking Derse, maybe."

Dave pointed out reasonably, "She could've been hanging with other versions of herself."

"You and Aradia are literally the _only ones_ who voluntarily do that."

"Bullshit. You talk to yourself all the time."

Kanaya said impatiently, "You are both being very silly. Any of her friends who met her would have shown her their memories of this place. It was always meant to be hers.”

Karkat was thinking that the footsteps in the sugar seemed too small. The world seemed too big, the Medium seemed too big, everything was too big. They were so fucking small and stupid, so why did things have to keep shaping whole worlds around them? It was all fucking wrong.

“So what are we gonna do, you’re the boss of dream problems right now I guess.”

He put his head in his hands. "- what's even the point of finding her, if he's not here. Fine, let's follow those footprints, even though they are totally a fucking trap, given that this fucking planet has "traps" _right in its name."_

They did. A little while later they of course fell down a pit with spikes at the bottom.

Potentially nearby, in a sense, yet also somehow entirely inaccessible, there had been a cake topped with a red sugar dragon and smudged congratulatory words. After they left, it remained there for a little while longer. An even worse conversation was taking place on top of it.

-

BUT DO YOU TH1NK 4BOUT H1M

4LL TH3 T1M3 1 M34N, 3V3N WH3N YOU DONT W4NT TO

Yes.

4ND 1T M4K3S YOU F33L FUCK1NG S1CK TH4T H3S GOTT3N SO F4R 1NS1D3 YOU, TH4T H3’S TH3R3 3V3N WH3N H3’S NOT TH3R3 3V3N WH3N H3S PROB4BLY NOT TH1NK1NG OF YOU 3V3N WH3N

…

DO YOU TH1NK 4BOUT W4NT1NG TO HURT H1M

M4K3 H1M P4Y FOR WH4T H3S M4D3 YOU

4LL TH3 D4MN T1M3

N9.

I _sh9uld,_ th9ugh. I kn9w that I’m supp9sed t9. It’s s9mething that’s g9tten 6r9ken in me. 6ut I’m g9ing t9 fix it -

4R3 YOU STUP1D??? TH1S 1SN’T SOM3TH1NG YOU SHOULD _W4NT!_

T9 feel anger instead of fear? 9f c9urse it is!

TH4T’S NOT WH4T 1 M34N!

WHY DO YOU W4NT TO F33L TH4T 4BOUT _H1M?_ 1 M34N 1 DON’T C4R3 4BOUT YOU OBV1OUSLY YOUR3 4LR34DY D34D 4ND US3L3SS

WORS3 TH4N US3L3SS! YOUR3 THROW1NG TH1NGS OFF JUST BY B31NG 4MONG TH3 L1V1NG

TW1ST1NG TH1NGS OUT OF TH31R PROP3R P4TH!

I kn9w. I kn9w that much 9kay?! I didn’t mean t9 d9 this t9 Karkat! 9r any 9f y9u. I never wanted t9 hurt any9ne else.

Y34H W3LL _MOST_ P3OPL3 DONT M34N TO

BUT 1TS W4Y TOO L4T3 FOR R3GR3TS NOW TH3 TH1NG TH4T ST1LL M4TT3RS 1S TH4T TH1S H4S TO STOP!

YOUR3 1MPORT4NT TO K4RK4T NOW FOR SOM3 STUP1D R34SON 4ND 1F YOU K33P C1RCL1NG B4CK TO 4 GROSS 3V1L CLOWN YOUR3 SC4R3D OF OUT OF

SOM3 STUP1D S3NS3 OF 1NCOMPL3T3N3SS OR OBL1G4T1ON OR WH4T3V3R

1TS GO1NG TO RU1N YOU FOR3V3R

WH1CH 1S 4 R34LLY LONG TIME BTW

I in fact fucking kn9w that, thank y9u! D9 y9u?! Are y9u thinking a69ut what _y9u’re_ d9ing? A69ut what y9u’re leaving und9ne?

Y34H 4CTU4LLY 1 4M! 4ND DO YOU S3R1OUSLY TH1NK _YOUR3_ 1N 4NY POS1T1ON TO G1V3 M3 SH1T 4BOUT 1T?

S9rry.

LOOK IT DO3SNT M4TT3R JUST DROP 1T

I mean. Listen. I appreciate y9ur intenti9ns, and I kn9w that y9u d9 6elieve that y9u’re helping.

OH GOG

And I kn9w y9u think that this is s9me s9rt 9f self-flagellating gesture 9f penance 9n my part, a way t9 av9id pr9perly taking resp9nsi6ility f9r my acti9ns.

H3Y BRO YOU S41D 1T NOT M3

And may6e that’s fucking part 9f it, I guess, I d9n’t kn9w. 6ut s9mething g9t cut 9ut 9f me a l9ng time ag9, the a6ility t9 hate pr9perly, t9 feel real anger. I can’t ap9l9gize t9 her if I am n9t entirely the pers9n I sh9uld 6e.

WHY SHOULD SH3 3V3N C4R3 4BOUT YOUR PROBL3MS???

WH3TH3R YOUR3 S3LF-4CTU4L1Z3D OR WH4T3V3R DUMB WORD YOU W4NT TO US3!

That’s the 9ne. That dum6 w9rd.

And that's n9t it. I’ll never _find_ her while I’m like this. I can see myself the way that I am n9w searching f9rever and never finding her, and that’s the 9nly thing I _can_ see that seems right anym9re. S9mething has t9 change in me.

TH3N DO WH4T ROS3 TOLD YOU 4ND F1ND PORR1M 1NST34D

OR! JUST DO WH4T 1 TOLD YOU 4ND STOP W4ST1NG OUR T1M3!

1T DO3SNT M4TT3R WH3TH3R YOUR3 R34LLY M4D 4T H1M OR NOT!

M4YB3 1TS 3V3N B3TT3R 1F YOUR3 NOT 4ND YOU DONT F33L 4NYTH1NG WH3N YOU F1N4LLY DO 1T

YOU JUST H4V3 TO K1LL H1M! TH4TS 4LL

I d9n’t want t9 kill him - 9r I guess d9u6le-9r-triple kill him whatever num6er it is at this p9int! I’m sick 9f l99king at 6l99d all the time. I just want t9 make him st9p d9ing what he’s d9ing. I have t9 find a way t9 d9 that.

HOW C4N YOU B3 SO STUP1D!

TH3R3S ONLY TH3 ON3 W4Y

-

Terezi did not wake up.


End file.
